I have been used to working with WHM/cPanel on my servers and I have the opportunity to get another server but only with the choice of Windows 2003 Server or FreeBSD.
How easy am I likely to find making a change to either of the two options (which I haven't used before) and which one would you recommend I try out of the two? I am not a server expert and some management would come with the package as long as I don't opt for root access.

TIA

Anyone offer some thought on this please?

i would say windows myself :)

Well if you don't know FreeBSD its not going to be fun.

If your coming from cPanel and going to keep cPanel on the new server (if you choose FreeBSD) i think going FreeBSD would be a good idea. windows maybe better but i don't know how cPanel to Helm or any other control panel is.

If you go for the windows one, you want to be sure that you will get a good control panel if you dont have root access. Helm is good for Windows servers, as is Plesk (to a certen extent).

If you go for the FreeBSD one you again will need a good control panel. cPanel, Directadmin, Interworx or ServerCP would do.

Forget about windows - the best migration machine for cPanel sites is cPanel. Plesk can migrate the sites but will take one day per site to fix changed paths and lost info - if the cpbackups are small. For large cpbackups there is only one solution - cPanel. :)

cPanel install fine on FreeBSD 5.4, but has to be tweaked here and there. You will find that my.cnf is in a very strange place when it fails to start for the first time. As well as the mysql.sock...

Otherwise the sites migrate seamlessly to FreeBSD and the CPU consumption falls dramatically by 2 or 3 times.