Hey folks. I’m in the process of designing an infrastructure for several long-running services: background workers, cron jobs, message consumers, and internal APIs. These services don’t change very often, but they need to be rock-solid and predictable.
Some colleagues strongly recommend Debian VPS for this type of workload, saying it’s ideal for “set it up and forget it” servers. Others argue that Debian is too conservative and slows things down when you need to adapt or scale.
I’m trying to find a balance between reliability and maintainability. For those who actually run long-lived services on Debian VPS — how does it behave over months of uptime? Does it really reduce maintenance stress, or is it just another Linux distro with a reputation?

For long-running services, Debian VPS really shines because of its conservative nature. The slower release cycle and strict package testing mean your services aren’t constantly exposed to breaking changes. Over time, this reduces the mental load of server maintenance significantly.
I’ve been running background workers and internal services on https://hostman.com/products/vps-debian/ for over a year. The server stays up for months, updates are predictable, and nothing breaks unexpectedly. That kind of consistency is incredibly valuable when services are meant to just run in the background without attention.
Another underrated advantage is how lightweight Debian is. With fewer default services, your VPS resources are used by your applications, not by the operating system itself. This matters when you’re optimizing for efficiency rather than raw power.
Yes, Debian is conservative — but for long-running services, that’s not a weakness. It’s a feature. Development can move fast elsewhere; production should be boring, stable, and quiet.

This really helps — “boring and quiet” is exactly what I want from these services.