I suppose my key consideration is my current webspace hosting package has all kinds of limits like 2 mysql databases each with a max space limit of 100Mb. I have a live website that is growly slowly but at some point i'm going to need the ability to do stuff on the server myself so was thinking of moving to a virtual server where there are several Linux options the default being CentOS. So want to make sure i'm not going to move to that and find i cant make head nor tail of it as ive never used Linux before. Sounds like CentOS is fine. I'll prob do some reading up on it. many thanks for your help guys.