Solid, but there are gotchas

Server OS’s are fundamentally different than consumer OS’s. A server OS must run 24/7, often exposed to the internet, and remain stable and secure even while serving GB’s or TB’s of data.

If you go into this thinking it’ll be like the consumer experience, forget about it. To have success with this OS, it’s essential to understand you are dealing with a SERVER and all servers need careful planning and babying.

This Server OS is no different than other OS’s I’ve maintained for 20+ years. You need backups, clones, careful planning… Yes, the GUI makes certain things easier, but some things are more difficult than servers running tools like cPanel. It depends on what your goal is.

We’ve been running this OS on a server farm for ~6 months, and it has been rock solid. The initial setup was not “a walk in the park.” There were several things we had to workaround. But in the end, everything works as expected, and is more stable than our Linux-based VPS hosting was, at a lower monthly cost. (However, that doesn’t include the labor of setting it up).

If you’re hoping for a “plug and play” experience, if you have a simple configuration, you may experience that. However, if your configuration involves anything unusual, then expect to spend time and planning in deploying this. For example, if you want to set up the VPN, make sure you know what you’re doing. I do, and I still had issues at first. VPN setup is not trivial. However, basic web page hosting and email is pretty straightforward.

The reasons I gave this four stars instead of five:
1. The built in CURL wasn’t working correctly for certain wordpress sites. I had to reinstall using Homebrew.
2. Some of the tools, e.g. PHP, are quite “old” and need to be updated to more modern versions

My config includes a test machine MacMini where I try out all updates before deploying them to the live server, along with not only backups but regular clones of the machine to a second machine.

I am happy overall with this Server OS, and hope that Apple will keep maintaining it in spite of the sometimes overly negative reviews (sometimes stemming from lack of planning/backups/test machines).

ElevatingCreativity about macOS Server, v5.1.5