Certification: which Linux cert for hosting specifically?

Bangalore perspective: RHCSA/RHCE is basically mandatory if you want to work for any of the big IT services companies that manage hosting for Western clients. TCS, Infosys, Wipro all filter for it.

But if you are doing independent hosting or working for small Indian providers serving local market, LPIC is fine and much cheaper. I have both. RHCSA got me my corporate day job. LPIC-1 got me my first hosting gig years ago.

My homelab has 12 nodes. RHCSA prep involved breaking and fixing them repeatedly. Best prep there is.

Three datacenter fires. Zero data lost. That is my cert.

But seriously: I have no Linux cert. I have a burned datacenter in 2019, another in 2021, a third in 2023. Insurance investigators ask different questions than HR. They want to see your runbooks, your backup verification logs, your DR test results.

Cert is checkbox. DR plan is what keeps you employed when the fire happens.

If you want a cert, get the cheapest checkbox. Spend the money on offsite backups instead.

New Jersey here. I bring snacks to the NOC and I bring no opinions about certs because I am not technical. But I have watched the hiring process from the other side of the glass partition.

The technical manager wants to see your home lab or your GitHub with Ansible playbooks. The HR person wants to see a cert so they can justify the hire to their boss. The CFO wants neither, they want to know if you can work nights without overtime complaints.

Different audiences. RHCSA impresses HR. GitHub impresses the tech lead. Willingness to work Thanksgiving impresses the CFO.

I bring snacks on Thanksgiving.

Kuala Lumpur. Hosting market here is growing fast. I see many job ads from Singapore companies hiring remote from Malaysia. They ask for RHCSA if the role is "Linux system administrator" and LPIC if the role is "technical support engineer."

The pay difference is significant. RHCSA roles pay 30-40% more. But they also expect you to know more than the cert covers. I am studying for RHCSA now, using AlmaLinux 9 on old Dell hardware from local secondhand market.

Cost of living advantage: my RHCSA exam fee is one month salary for some roles here. Serious investment.

Also Warsaw here. I confirm what letgarden says. But I want to add: Hetzner has datacenter in Finland and Germany, not in Poland. Many Polish hosting companies use Hetzner dedicated or colo in Germany because price is good and latency to Poland is fine.

For cert, I think LPIC-1 is enough to start. I have it and I work with OVHcloud servers in Limburg and Warsaw. Nobody asked for more.

Amsterdam here. White label hosting provider. I sell servers from OVHcloud, Hetzner, Vultr with my own branding. I hire support techs.

I do not care which cert you have. I care that you can handle a ticket at 3 AM when a customer on my white label server has a kernel panic and thinks it is my hardware.

My best tech has no cert. My worst tech has RHCE. The difference is curiosity and willingness to read logs.

But I put "Linux cert preferred" on ads because it reduces applications from people who cannot even install Ubuntu. It is a filter, not a requirement.

This thread has been eye-opening. I came in thinking RHCSA was objectively better for hosting. Now I see the market is fragmented by region and company size.

My plan now:

• LPIC-1 first, get the checkbox, prove I can study to a syllabus
• Build documented home lab with CentOS Stream 9 and AlmaLinux 9 for RHCSA prep
• RHCSA within 12 months if I see enough job ads requiring it in Dublin
• Never let the uptime drop below 99.97% while doing any of this

The 14 nodes demand attention. The cert demands attention. I need better time management, not better opinions.

The graphs don't lie but the cert prep will eat your weekends,,,,, I have seen good techs let monitoring slip while studying,,,,, Then they have the cert and a 3 AM outage they sleep through,,,,, Automate your alerts before you open the books,,,,, ~~dave

Following this thread. Currently working helpdesk, want to move to hosting. LPIC-1 seems like the consensus starting point.

Same here. Following.