Every once in a while I come across questions like “Is Linux better then Windows Web hosting” or “Do I need to change my OS on my Computer when I get Linux Web Hosting?”. For some people questions like this are easy to answer, for others it is a matter of life or death 🙂 Today I want to show you the real difference between Linux and Windows Web hosting and dispel some myths.

What is the difference between Linux and Windows Web Hosting

The real difference between Linux and Windows Web hosting is not much more than the name and price. The standard internet applications work well on both platforms. We are talking about applications based on standards like PHP, MySQL, Ruby on Rail that are platform independent. What makes a big difference between this is that both OS have Microsoft based language, like ASP or Dot Net, and are not working well or not running at all on Linux Server and that PHP and MySQL applications are slower on Windows Server. Also note that Windows hosting companies will need to pay for licenses that would make it more expensive than Linux Hosting which is Open Source. Linux servers are generally more stable and you can tweak more on this platform in comparison to Windows.

The real difference between this most commonly used Operating System in Web hosting is what you want to do with your hosting package, what software you want to use and most importantly, what your system administrator prefers if you are planning to host your server on your own.

Which Web Hosting OS should you choose?

There is no clear easy answer, as in the choice between a Mercedes or BMW, it is up to you. To determine what works best for you, you might ask what do you want to use in programming language that your application will run on and what knowledge does your Technical Team have? And don’t forget Why reliable Web Hosting is worth your Money.

Myths about Web Hosting

• No, you don’t need to change your Operation System on your Home / Office computer if you use Linux Hosting
• You don’t save money hosting the server yourself
• Hosting is a important part of your e-Business

What are the Pros and Cons of the OS?

Pros for Windows Hosting:

• If properly administrated, you will have a secure and stable Server system
• Supports all common Internet language like PHP and MySQL also supports Microsoft based products like ASP and MsSQL

Cons for Windows Hosting:

• More expensive then Linux hosting
• Non-Microsoft based language tends to run slower on Windows Servers
• Some changes in the Server Administration could result in a reboot of the Server

Pros for Linux Hosting:

• Fast, easy and flexible – it can easily grow with your e-Business
• Open Source, thousands of people looking to fix problems and support each other, great community
• Stable, most Linux Webservers get restarted once or twice a year

Cons for Linux Hosting

• Implementation for ASP and .Net application is lacking
• Wrong setup and bad administration can lead to slow and insecure servers

Why should you plan ahead?

Choosing your Web Hosting is like choosing the location of your off-line store and how much thought you put into the interior of your shop. As an example, you open up a coffee shop on the last open corner of a busy Vancouver intersection; the other corners are occupied by 2 Starbucks and 1 Java Express. All of them are bigger, faster and cheaper. You don’t have the money to spend on some fancy equipment, the building your shop resides in is old and you can hear the rats when you’re alone in the kitchen. You didn’t have money either to pay somebody to stand at the other corners and advertise for your shop, Starbucks does and they advertise in front of your shop by giving free regular coffees away. Do you think that it would be clever to have your business here when you come on to the market?

So plan, look ahead to what you need, where do you want to grow to and what is a good location to start your business. Search for a strong partner, ask your friends, ask your designer and search engine marketer for recommendations, build a relationship with your partner, and find somebody who wants to help you rather then just get a sale through.

Future Reading:

• Why reliable Web Hosting is worth your Money
• Most commonly used Operation System in Web hosting

Reliable web hosting can make a huge difference whether your e-Business will succeed or not, if you will be able to grow in the long run or fail. Reliable web hosting is a indicator of how serious you are with your e-Business and it will help you to better please your customers and increase your search engine ranking.

Cheap can cost you more

Cheap web hosting often comes with huge flaws and can easily backfire on you. Every downtime costs money, every time a potential customer visits your site and can’t reach it, you lose that potential customer forever. Webmasters don’t like to link to websites which are offline every once in a while, broken links will look bad on the site. If search engines send out their spiders to crawl your site every 10 days and your site is offline on that day, the lovely spiders don’t like that so you will be kicked out of the index until it can crawl again. What is the True Downtime Cost (TDC)? By Don Fitchett nicely describes how you can determine the true cost of a system failing. If you want to save money somewhere, then don’t save it on your Web Hosting. The hidden cost of system downtime could make all the difference in having a successful e-Business.

Common Cheap Hosting problems

Commonly cheap small – mid hosting companies are putting thousands of domains / customers on a single server with a single IP and promising resources that are not even available. It makes sense to do so from a hosting point of view, the cost of having empty servers standing around is enormous. But the rundown for customers is that you can’t influence the websites on your IP, you could have a shady Porn or Warez site running on the same IP and server. Creating enormous amounts of traffic that results in longer loading time of your website. If a customer is not willing to wait, and he will not be willing, for your site there are hundreds other websites offering the same or similar products or information just a click away. Security is another huge issue. It is common in shady markets like the above to have a constant wave of attacks on your site. If you are sharing your hosting with sites like that it is not only their server that gets hacked. Do you want to lose all your data? How good is your backup routine by the way? We talked about the true cost of Cheap Web Hosting, now think about how much it costs you to be offline every few days or having the loss of all your data. Sometimes your website is so slow that nobody can bear to visit it. If you want to prevent most common web hosting problems, find a partner that have the service level as well as the hosting standards to truly accommodate your e-Business.

Why you should never use free hosting for your e-Business

Free web hosting is exactly what it is, Free and that is the great thing about it. You don’t pay for it, so you get exactly that much from it. The common problems you can expect from free web hosting are:

• Banner or Text ads across the top of your website
• Pop ups or Pop under ads
• Slow connection to the server
• Downtime occurs often
• Low security, htaccess is often not even available
• Almost no configuration possibilities
• Thousands of domains hosted on one server
• Very bad neighborhood for search engine ranking
• Search engine could have trouble indexing your site

Most of these points also count for cheap web hosting. The fact alone that your server neighborhood, sites hosted on the same IP, will be bad, would be enough to get your web site devalued by search engines. But also slow connections or even connection problems could lead to devaluation of your web site and could stop you from ranking highly. There are a lot of trade offs when you are hosting for free, even when you just host a blog on a free blog service site, it could inhibit you from ranking well. So ask yourself the question, Why Should I Pay for Web Hosting?

Future Reading:

• What is the True Downtime Cost (TDC)? By Don Fitchett
• Why Should I Pay for Web Hosting?
• 3 Things You MUST Know Before Buying Web Hosting
• Hosting Providers’ Network Performance
• How to Migrate Blogger Powered Blogs to WordPress