Choosing a VPS Template: Ubuntu and Beyond

When you provision or reinstall a RepublicNodes KVM VPS, you pick a base OS template — the clean operating system image your VM boots from.

What's Available Right Now

Our current KVM VPS plans ship with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS as the standard template — a solid, widely-supported, long-term-support release that's the default choice for the overwhelming majority of VPS workloads (web apps, Docker, game server hosting-inside-a-VPS, dev environments, bots).

Why Ubuntu 24.04 Specifically

• LTS = long-term support: security updates for years, not months — you're not forced into a disruptive OS upgrade on someone else's timeline.
• Massive documentation and community support: almost any setup guide, Stack Overflow answer, or tutorial you find assumes Ubuntu/Debian-family commands work, which they will.
• Broad software compatibility: Docker, Node.js, Python, database servers, and virtually every self-hosted app ships official Ubuntu instructions or a .deb package.

If You Need a Custom ISO Instead

Every KVM VPS plan also supports booting from your own custom ISO (up to 5 GB) — if you need a different Linux distro, a BSD variant, or something entirely outside our standard templates, this is the path. See our full custom ISO boot guide for the exact steps. This is genuinely full hardware-level virtualization (KVM), so almost any x86_64 OS that can boot from an ISO will work.

Reinstalling to a Fresh Template

If your VPS needs a clean slate — a botched setup, a compromised system, or you just want to start over — you can self-service reinstall back to the Ubuntu 24.04 template from your service's management page. This wipes the disk and reinstalls fresh; see our reinstall guide for exactly what does and doesn't survive that process.

Picking Between Template and Custom ISO

• Use the standard template if Ubuntu works for your use case (it does for almost everyone) — it's the fastest path to a working VPS, zero extra setup.
• Use a custom ISO only if you specifically need something Ubuntu can't give you — a different distro family, a niche OS, or a very particular kernel/setup requirement.

For nearly every real workload — hosting an app, running Docker, self-hosting a service, running a bot — the default Ubuntu 24.04 template is the right call and the one we'd recommend unless you have a specific reason not to.