Hi,

I was wondering what The benefits of windows hosting over linux hosting were.

Looking for comments/feedback on the subject.

Hi Robbie,

You're asking a loaded question! It's a broad topic and there's a lot of other threads about this. One of hundreds of examples on this forum alone: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=972966

The debate of Windows vs. Linux is nearly endless. It's like Mac vs. PC. You'll find as much good information as you will bad (biased) information touting either one. My simple answer to you would be you use the right tool for the job. Each platform has strengths and weaknesses. As someone intimately familiar with running Windows servers, I'm biased too. :)

As a very generalized statement, I would say Windows is obviously targeted to the Microsoft stack and developers for .NET (VB/C#) applications. With Windows 2008 you also get a strong PHP platform for the thousands of open source applications out there. Windows is familiar and has a GUI. Of course, with anything Microsoft comes licensing considerations (you have to pay for it).

Linux is free and open source. It's hard to compete with 'free'. Linux is typically viewed as lower resource usage and higher performance for web applications. With linux, it's nearly always all command line interface which is uncomfortable for some. With linux you have many variations and flavors to chose from, each with a rabid following.

The arguments that linux is more secure than Windows is IMHO out-dated and simply not true. Anyone can run an insecure server on either platform. It takes effort and knowledge to securely run any OS. Both servers can run high performance websites! Microsoft.com is one of the highest traffic websites on internet especially when you consider Windows Update. It all runs on IIS. On the other hand, you have sites like Facebook and Twitter running on linux and Apache.

For me, Windows offers more choice (ASP, .NET and PHP) with a great interface and is a 'complete solution' when you factor things like database services and developer environments. Customers can run a .NET shopping cart and a PHP blog/forum on the same site using the same tools.

Again, right tool for the job. You simply need to determine your requirements and what fits best for you.

Windows hosting is for ASP & ASP.NET websites.
If you need hosting for a php or html sites, just get linux hosting which is usually cheaper and more providers to choose.

A lot of people think that since they run Windows on their computer that they need Windows hosting... Beyond that if you're going to run something that is a Microsoft technology such as ASP.net and ASP then I'd suggest Windows but Linux is making leaps and bounds at fully supporting these every day.

I personally prefer Linux, but that's my personal preference and doesn't mean that there is anything wrong with Windows hosting or that it can't do something Linux can do :)

Thanks for all of your replies, I appreciate them!

It Simple mean that at Linux is best.

It Simple mean that at Linux is best.

No... OS/400 is the best. :stickout:

There is a market for Windows hosting (that is growing) and there is a market for Linux hosting. ASP is of course and for the foreseeable feature going to be best supported on Windows. That being said, if you are not using SQL/ASP, I can't think of a single reason to go with Windows hosting over tried and true LAMP setup.