par AL Rachels.
Hi Chase,
I switched to CentOS and LAMP about two years ago and have been very happy with the results and capabilities.
I self host on a box with an 8 core AMD CPU with 32GB of RAM running at 3.6 GHz. The best thing I did performance wise was installing a 256 GB SSD.
There have been a few problems along the way that took a little research on the web to get them to work, but overall it has been a really nice setup.
AL