The good thing about FreeBSD it comes with an Elixir package, whereas Elixir is not available at all for my Linux distribution of choice, CentOS. Also WhatsApp runs Erlang on FreeBSD so I guess there’s an obvious connection there

Still, we’ve moved pretty much everything from FreeBSD to CentOS due to better support from (virtual) hardware vendors and some bad experiences running routine upgrades on FreeBSD. It’s a great OS though without the massive fragmentation that Linux has.

Here is a link to deploying Phoenix on FreeBSD 11-0-RELEASE on Google’s Compute Engine. The setup uses nginx, Letsencrypt, Distillery and eDeliver.

https://github.com/jfreeze/gce-freebsd

Reasons to host a production Phoenix project on FreeBSD instead of Linux
YMMV of course

• Stability, stability, stability.

• Updating your FreeBSD base system to new releases in future follows a reliable and predictable path, that you can plan for and trust, years in advance.

• Mail server out of the box. Nothing to configure, and Bamboo hooks straight into it without fuss.

• No systemd - you know that your system setup written in 2021 will still boot in 2051 without modifications, and will behave the same then as now.

• Jails

• Extreme low memory footprint, extreme low disk usage

• ZFS out of the box

• DTrace

• Networking stack is possibly better (was true in the past, probably not so much with each passing year)

• Amazon / Microsoft / IBM / Facebook / Apple / Google / NSA / CIA / FSB / MI6 / … are not in a position to hijack the BSDs at a whim. BSDs come with a free tin foil hat, protecting you from bad guys and 5G remote control.