There is no one-word answer to this question: Linux or Windows hosting; which is better? A fundamental question is asked by all web hosting service buyers, especially beginners with no prior web hosting experience. The primary factors that should drive your choice of the two options should be the variety of content that your site hopes to provide to your audience, the preferred web application choice, the projected traffic and also, among many other factors, the design of the systems control you hope to have.
The first comparison between the two lies in the installation. Linux web hosting installation is easy, making it a preferred choice for many website owners. According to the common myth, people assume that because their computer runs Windows, they, too, have to buy a Windows hosting package. But this myth is absolutely wrong. You can generally access your web account through FTP or a control panel; both servers support these methods. However, the significant difference lies in the FTP commands that are somewhat different in Linux and Windows. In short, occasionally, when you try to get your FTP program to do something, it returns an error message. Still, this won’t happen very often. Linux and Windows Hosting provide the same features that, including PHP, MySQL, POP3 and many more. The significant difference arises when you want to create your site using Access, Windows Streaming Media, ASP.NET environment, FrontPage or any other Microsoft technologies. Then, you’re bound to use Windows as your hosting server. However, Linux has limited support for these technologies, and all that are available are very expensive.
The following points to argue are the reliability and stability of the servers. Windows is far more insecure in comparison to Linux. Windows is widely used as an operating system for home PCs but not Linux. However, Linux is equally insecure as a whopping number of successful hack attempts have been made on it till now. Thus, in the end, we can say that the security of both servers usually depends upon the competency of the system administrators. Herein, if you’re security-minded,, you’ll choose the best and secure hosting company irrespective of the selected server. Now, discussing the performance, there isn’t much difference between the two. Linux is faster than Windows as Linux is loaded with extendable implementation.
