Note that there is no technical requirement for domain names and web servers to be hosted by the same company (sometimes there are contractual requirements)

There is no contractual need for me to keep the domains with the host. My first websites were hosted elsewhere but didn't offer the facilities I needed so I moved to hosting with the same company with which I already had several domains. To be honest, I really could do with moving away from shared hosting as I have 9 significant business sites on there plus another 7 smaller businesses and numerous other domains which either redirect or have a holding page...

Looking at what I actually use, I can get the second VPS package up from the same host and pay the same money as the shared hosting gets me. I'm happy with their customer support (apart from not upgrading Perl of course!) so staying seems sensible. Disk capacity and bandwidth are sufficient and I imagine 1 Cores and 1Gb RAM would be enough.

This leaves me with the OS choice...
I plan to buy a refurbished PC and I'm thinking that an i5 3rd generation should be plenty good enough - high enough spec do you think? On to that I will install the same flavour OS as the webserver and then configure it in as much the same way as I can so I have a test platform to minimise any kind of critical problems.

The OS choices are:
- Gentoo64 (which I've never heard of!)
- FreeBSD
- CentOS 7
- Ubuntu 16
- Debian 9
- Ubuntu 18
- Debian 10
- CentOS 8
- Ubuntu 20

I have no information on which to base a decision so any advice would be extremely welcome...

Here are some thoughts on your choice of O/S:

Gentoo

Optimised but low-level so you will need to know what you are doing. Rolling release. Probably not ideal for your situation unless you can get someone experienced to be sysadm (in which case this would be a great choice).

FreeBSD

Solid.

CentOS 7

Old, well supported, but systemd. Goes EoL in 2024. System perl is 5.16.3 (but 5.26 also available) so could well be what is powering your current shared hosting.

Ubuntu 16

Already past EoL. Do not use.

Debian 9

Goes EoL in mid-2022. Why not go for 10?

Ubuntu 18

Well supported, but systemd. Why not go for 20, though?

Debian 10

Solid, released in 2019 but systemd.

CentOS 8

Goes EoL at year end. Consider Rocky or Alma or any of the other relabels instead. Still systemd, however.

Ubuntu 20

Well supported, but systemd. LTS so EoL in 2025.

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Disk capacity and bandwidth are sufficient and I imagine 1 Cores and 1Gb RAM would be enough.

If you are going to be running a webserver and a database and a number of persistent perl applications 1GB is unlikely to suffice. However, most VPS providers can easily upgrade the RAM as and when you need it so you can start low and then ramp up as you approach the ceiling.

Don't forget about backups.

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🦛

Thank you hippo - that is extremely helpful

I will be the only sysadmin so Gentoo is definitely out of the question!

System perl is 5.16.3 (but 5.26 also available) so could well be what is powering your current shared hosting

I think you could be right...
I have been looking at this article to try and find out what the shared hosting is actually running. Most of the commands they suggest are not available...at least not over SSH. But cat /proc/version yields:

Linux version 3.10.0-962.3.2.lve1.5.39.el7.x86_64 (mockbuild@buildfarm
+2.com) (gcc version 4.8.5 20150623 (Red Hat 4.8.5-39) (GCC) ) #1 SMP 
+Thu Sep 17 06:10:33 EDT 2020
[download]

Which looks remarkable similar to the sample output from a CentOS 7 box!

but systemd

I had no idea what systemd was...
Looking it up, I have little more idea but, more to the point, don't know whether it is a good thing or a bad thing...the online world seems to be pretty divided on the issue.

Don't forget about backups

Good call...

Currently I have a script that takes a DB dump in the early hours of each morning and names it according to the day of the week. So there are always 7 individual days of backups available on the server. I have another script here at home that pulls those backup files off the server so I have them locally on three separate machines. So database backups are reasonably safe. I also have a script that zips up the CGI-BIN of the most critical sites and takes them offsite weekly.

For a VPS I will probably need to beef this up...