All products 
openSUSE on a VPS: Leap or Tumbleweed, and what to consider when ordering
openSUSE is a community distribution backed by Germany's SUSE, one of the oldest Linux vendors. It appears in host templates less often than Ubuntu or RHEL-based systems, more often with European and especially German companies; Russian hosts frequently don't list it at all. People usually choose openSUSE deliberately: administrators who work with SUSE Linux Enterprise at their company, and those who like zypper, YaST and system rollback via btrfs snapshots.
Leap or Tumbleweed
openSUSE has two main server editions, and they are easy to mix up in an OS list.
- Leap is the stable release with fixed package versions. Since the 15.3 branch, Leap has been built from the same binary packages as SUSE Linux Enterprise, so software certified for SLES usually works here too. Release 15.6 was the last in the 15 branch, and the new Leap 16 branch came out in autumn 2025. For a server that has to run for years without surprises, choose Leap.
- Tumbleweed is a rolling release: there are no versions, packages are updated continuously, and every snapshot goes through automated openQA testing. It suits test environments, build machines and anyone who needs the latest kernel and language versions. Arch Linux offers a similar model, but Tumbleweed's testing is stricter and rollback is easier.
There are also editions for containers, Leap Micro and MicroOS: an immutable root system, transactional updates and a minimum of packages. They are installed for Podman or K3s, usually from your own image.
btrfs snapshots: the key feature on a VPS
By default openSUSE installs on btrfs, and the snapper utility takes a system snapshot before and after every zypper update. If an update breaks booting or a service, you roll the server back with snapper rollback or pick an earlier snapshot in the bootloader menu via the host's VNC console. This is convenient but uses space: snapshots keep old versions of files, and on a 10–20 GB disk the root partition fills up quickly. Go for 40 GB or more and set limits in /etc/snapper/configs/root. Before a major update it's worth checking how much space snapshots take: snapper list shows them, and you can delete old ones manually without waiting for automatic cleanup.
Bear in mind that hosts build templates differently. Some install ext4 or XFS without snapper, and then there is no snapshot rollback. You can check with findmnt /: the FSTYPE column should say btrfs. If you specifically want a standard install with the default layout, install the system from the official image; on most KVM plans this is possible with a custom ISO.
Typical tasks and stacks
- Test environments for SLES. A company runs production servers on subscription SUSE Linux Enterprise and does staging and development on free Leap with the same package base.
- Web servers and databases. Apache, Nginx, PHP, MariaDB and PostgreSQL are in the standard repositories; additional versions are on the Open Build Service, which hosts thousands of community packages.
- Containers. Docker and Podman install via zypper, and for Kubernetes there are K3s and RKE2 from SUSE.
- SAP and enterprise software run primarily on SLES, but training and development environments are often deployed on Leap.
Popular hosting control panels, including cPanel and ISPmanager, don't support openSUSE. If you need a server for websites with a panel, look at AlmaLinux or Ubuntu.
A particular convenience of openSUSE is uniform systems for different roles. The same zypper, the same paths and the same systemd journal on a Leap test box, on production SLES and on a Leap Micro container node, so deployment scripts and Salt or Ansible configurations move between them with almost no changes. If your company already has SUSE servers, keeping rented VPSs on openSUSE is easier than adopting a separate distribution and a second set of runbooks for them.
What to check in a plan
In the OS list, check which edition and version are offered: "openSUSE" with no details may turn out to be an old Leap that no longer gets updates, so check cat /etc/os-release after installation. Leap is fine with 1–2 GB of memory; on the smallest plan, add swap, as zypper uses a fair amount of memory when refreshing repositories. Make sure the VNC console works: without it you can't pick a rollback snapshot in the bootloader. Also look at the "Payment" column: more of the hosts with this template are foreign, so payment options from Russia vary from plan to plan.