Linux or Windows Hosting - How to Decide on the Best Operating System for Your Site

Before choosing a suitable web hosting company for your new website, one of the first things you must decide on is the selection of a suitable operating system. Although there is a plethora of operating systems used by a multitude of web hosting companies, the major operating systems used by the majority are either Linux or Windows. In the remote past, the use of Windows as an operating system by web hosting companies was extremely rare, and Linux was the first choice of more than 95% companies. More recently however, an increasing number of web hosting providers have started offering Windows along with Linux as an operating system to their customers. There's not a clear advantage of one operating system over another. In some cases, linux web hosting might be the best choice while in others, the use of windows web hosting is definitely preferable.

The main motivation to choose a particular operating system depends on the personal web hosting needs of the customer. One of the best things about Linux is that it is open source, which makes it relatively cheaper in comparison with Windows, a commercial OS platform developed by Microsoft. Those who prefer the Linux operating system often quote this as its major advantage over the latter. As a result, it is not pragmatic to say as a general rule which operating system would do the best job for you, the prospective client. Nevertheless, it is important to point out some major differences between the two operating systems as well as the circumstances in which one might be preferred to another, and this article does exactly that.

One of the first considerations is to check the suitability of the applications to a particular operating system you intend to run on your hosting server. There are a host of applications that can be run on either of the above mentioned operating systems. However, there are others that run best either only on Linux or only on Windows. For example, Apache runs best on the Linux OS, while the best hosting platform for .NET applications is Microsoft Windows. While it may be possible to run some applications that are native to the Windows OS on Linux or vice versa, there are often security vulnerabilities associated with it. Consequently, the choice of your deployed applications often dictates which operating system would be the best for you. Choosing the wrong operating system in the beginning followed by the need to move to the right one later on can pose a real hassle to you.

The next important thing which needs to be focused on is related with issues of security. This is the most important thing for anyone operating a website, be it a personal user, a webmaster, an entrepreneur, or a business. There is a consensus among the web hosting community that Linux is typically much more secure than Windows. However, with proper administration and a rugged firewall setup, Windows can also be made almost as secure as Linux. As a result, none of these is again a winner in terms of a more secure hosting environment. An unskilled administrator running Linux can pose a much greater risk to the customer's website than an expert one who knows how to secure the Windows operating system.

The next major distinction between Linux and Windows based hosting packages is the price of the package itself. As already mentioned, because Linux is an open source operating system (which means free), it costs a web hosting company more to deploy Windows as compared with Linux, which adds to the total cost of the web hosting package. This is because the hosting company also has to keep a margin for the licensing fee paid for the Windows OS. Nevertheless, since the licensing fee is paid for the hundreds of servers being used by the company, this reduces the overall cost to the company in contrast to the one which would be required for a single server. As a result, it is seldom to see a major difference in the price of Linux and Windows-based hosting packages.

Another major factor affecting selection often quoted among the web development community is the total amount of training required for a particular deployed operating system. Fortunately, this difference is also negligible in the case of Linux versus Windows, which means that you don't need a lot of training to switch from one OS to another. If Windows is your current operating system, and you need to move to Linux later on, you will not have much difficulty using the new OS. In fact, in most of the cases, you will be using browser-based applications to access and administer your website which makes adapting to the new operating system irrelevant.

Finally, it is always good to use a test server where you test the changes before transferring them to your live website. The operating system of your test server should be the same as the one used by your main server in order for the changes to be reflected in an exact manner. However, it might be that your web hosting company is unable to offer your desired operating system on the test server because of their own specific regulations. This may make it a limitation for you and you might need some workaround to this problem. A simple solution is to use your personal home computer as a server with the right operating system deployed on it. You can connect to this computer remotely in order to test the changes before uploading them to your website.

To sum up, choosing the right operating system for your prospective website is not always a straightforward and clear-cut choice. Despite the important considerations mentioned above, it might not be easy for you to prefer a particular operating system over another. However, in most of the cases, it may be that none of the above-mentioned guidelines is applicable, and so the choice of Windows or Linux as a web hosting platform becomes immaterial. What is instead of much greater significance is the quality of the web hosting provider itself. If a hosting provider has a good uptime history, abundant bandwidth, and affordable prices, it makes sense to go with it regardless of whether it uses Linux or Windows as its operating system.

About the Article

This is a genuine article custom written for WHL (WebHostLead.com). WHL is an unbiased web hosting directory based on webmaster reviews about the best linux hosting companies as well as the best windows hosting companies.

Note: WHL holds all copyrights to this article. If you would like to publish the article on your website, you must include the "About the Article" section as well.

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