I once saw the command that Debian should rename their "versions" from:
Stable -> Enterprise Testing -> Desktop Unstable -> Developer
Enterprise doesn't just imply "stability" (More often than not, it doesn't imply that at all! Enterprises rarely ever have one machine that does anything; failure of any part is fine as long as the cluster stays intact, how else do you think you get Windows uptimes longer than security patch releases?).
Call it 'production' then, if enterprise isn't the right bit of jargon for the job. The point of the above comment is that debian stable is suitable for your internet facing systems. What it doesn't say is that it's a slow moving beast, and in some cases that's great, and in others it's not.
I feel bad about trusting servers to Fedora; we all moved away from Red Hat to Debian once upon a time anyway (hey, it was sold to our resident RHCE!), but the dissent is getting louder. I'd love to use White Box Enterprise, the SRPM-recompile of RHEL3, but then you get the same "it's as unsupported as Debian is" issue.
A lot of the shift from redhat to debian was because of apt. I wouldn't have moved away if apt-rpm as it is with FC1 existed then. The shift was also at a time when up2date was in its infancy, and most of us didn't give it a fair chance. I put up with a stable potato release, but upgraded to testing (the nascent 3.0 woody release) when I needed newer packages on my home machine, and on my hosted server when it was "getting close" to completion (when you no longer had to upgrade glibc every week...) Whats this 'as unsupported as Deban is' issue you speak of? If it's the standard "who do you sue?" FUD perpetuated by the anti-FOSS types, then its all a load of crap anyway because for most software you couldn't "sue" the manufacturer anyway. The click-through license you ignore when you install most packages means you consent to giving up most of your rights with respect to damages incurred from use or misuse of their software, in whatever circumstances they arise. If you're referring to a paid support network, who uses them anyway? Has anyone on this list made use of RH's pay-per-view support network, and have they been satisfied with the response they got? Was it worth what you paid ? (I'm honestly interested, as I've never paid for support in this fashion. Any problems I've come across have been solvable with judicious use of google, friends, and sometimes a small amount of magic) I guess I'm asking 'Is "it's unsupported" actually that much of a problem?'. And I don't want to hear "yes, because my boss won't like it", I'd like to hear some *actual* examples of where it falls through.