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Linux Server Hosting or Windows Server Hosting?

Which platform do you choose for hosting your website, Linux server hosting or Windows server hosting? Once a website has been created, it needs to be hosted on a server so that users can access it online. The internet web site hosting server serves the purpose of responding to HTTP protocols by executing scripts or delivery of requested files. The server is capable of identifying the file content types, so that it responds to client requests correctly.

Most affordable web site hosting services are similar since they all follow a common format, but some offer enhancements like SSI, Proxy and caching services, Access control and application connectivity or Special databases. These servers run on platforms that can be selected from the web host provider. Today, UNIX and Linux server hosting running Apache web server and Window 2000/2003 running Internet Information Server are the most popular and the major web host companies support these two servers.

A British Web and network consultancy known as Netcraft, operative since 1995 has been performing a monthly review of Web server software usage on computers connected to the Internet. The results were astonishing; in May 1996, from 193,000 survey respondents, thirty percent were utilizing some version of Apache HTTPd. Followed by NCSA HTTPd accounts at 25 percent, and then Netscape, with a 15 percent share of respondents. Though there are other known servers that are used like WebLogic, Zeus, iPlanet, SunONE etc.

An OS needs to be installed on the computers so that they can function suitably and the computers used today have Win 2003, Win 2000 and Win XP etc. Similarly when it comes to web servers, an OS is needed to use the different functionalities and each of these web servers operates a unique OS also known as web server platforms. Linux server hosting is one of the most common web platforms, as mentioned earlier, and available in Unix, NetBSD, FreeBSD and OpenBSD. Each version of UNIX has an exceptional relationship to the Internet; using a UNIX foundation the Internet was developed. Microsoft Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003 are now gaining ground as well-liked platforms.

With so many platforms, it gets quite complicated in selecting the right web server platform. For web pages that are basically static, i.e. containing mostly HTML files, any platform will work adequately. When the web pages have dynamic content that require the operation of server side functionality like JSP, PHP, ASP, CGI scripts or SSI, an ideal platform for web hosting would be Linux server hosting. Now if the website needs Windows based applications to be run, like Microsoft SQL server, Cold Fusion, MS Access, .Net, ASP etc, a web host provider that supports Microsoft's Windows server hosting platform is required.

A linux server hosting platform is capable of supporting server-side functionalities such as Perl, PHP, and MySQL. There are a few ecommerce hosting softwares that run on practically every platform like Perl, PHP and Flash. Similar to these, there are other open source software programs more capable on Linux server hosting than a Windows server hosting platform. This means that web hosting using a Linux server hosting platform is much cheaper than Windows server hosting.

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