I recently set up a VPS for personal projects — hosting tools, running monitoring stacks, experimenting with security setups. The first decision was the OS, and after going back and forth I settled on Debian 13.

Here’s why.

Stability you can trust

Debian’s reputation for stability isn’t marketing — it’s real. The release cycle is slow on purpose. Packages are tested heavily before they hit stable, and once they’re there they basically don’t change. That means I can leave the server running for months without worrying about a routine update breaking something at 2 AM.