good question!
Alma isn’t a weird flavor of Linux, not at all - Red Hat killed the CentOS project and so 2 forks were created; Alma and Rocky - both are enterprise level OS’s (you can think of Alma as being the new Cent), however i think Alma may turn out to be the more ethical of the two in the long run from a free software POV (Alma is non-profit)
anyone that is familiar with CentOS will feel right at home with Alma (or Rocky) since it is essentially a drop-in replacement for Cent
another big reason for choosing a RHEL-based OS is ConfigServer Firewall (CSF) which i (and many others) prefer over FirewallD+Fail2Ban
while CSF “works” with Ubuntu, i think it is much better integrated with a RHEL derivative out-of-the-box
no doubt CSF will require an hour or more of initial set-up for those unfamiliar with it, but the task is a simple one in that it only requires some (some=a lot) reading and flipping preferences on and off rather than dealing with RegEx’s and scripting
CSF also includes a Login Failure Damon (LFD) which can watch most any log file you want, as well as monitor the integrity of critical system files, or any other files you wish, and setting it up could hardly be any simpler
i’m more keen on nginx, but for the moment it seems Virtualmin works better with Apache according to what i’ve read - there’s a couple features of Virtualmin that aren’t available with nginx, though i’ll be damned if i can find that document at the moment
another reason is that i don’t want to lengthen the guide with options - it started out as notes for my personal use, but i decided to format and document it better and stick it on-line
AlmaLinux OS - Forever-Free Enterprise-Grade Operating System
AlmaLinux vs. Rocky Linux: Exploring the Key Differences | OpenLogic by Perforce