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This is an interesting question asked many times over the Internet.  Which is Operating System of choice when considering the platform for web hosting? It doesn’t matter whether you are opting for shared web hosting or dedicated hosting; many hosting companies offered both options – so what are the differences between them?

Hosting Prices

If you do a web search for web hosting packages, you will find that Windows hosting option is likely to be more expensive than Linux hosting. Why is this so? This is likely due to the license charges for proprietary software packages used in Windows hosting – including Windows Server licenses.  On the other hand, Linux offers more variety of open sourced licenses and hence the cheaper prices.

Website Development

Windows hosting is suitable for companies who adopt Microsoft .Net technologies as a standard development platform for their website, or have been building websites using FrontPage. This is especially true for those opting for dedicated Windows hosting as there will be lesser associated training, development and deployment costs. The ease of integration with other Windows products also makes this kind of hosting a viable choice for Microsoft-centric web content providers.

Linux dedicated hosting, on the other hand, is more suitable for those on the LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP) platform primarily using PHP as a tool for website development. Linux junkies, however, will like the “total control” the shell scripts offered by Linux. PHP is a matured development platform of choice for the open community and had been adopted by major content providers, including Facebook.

Dedicated hosting generally provides more flexibilities and options to deliver contents over the Internet.  With dedicated hosting, you can install different types of web scripting engines to host your application.  For example, for those savvy with Java Server Pages (JSP) technology, you can easily configure it in your dedicated hosting server and start loading your application in no time.  This is not usually possible in shared web hosting, as JSP is not commonly available in such platform.

For those opting for shared web hosting, it doesn’t really matter which are the underlying operating systems. This is because most web hosting companies provide GUI based site configuration tools e.g. cpanel hosting tool, to help you managed your sites. You will have no problems with other third party application installations, such as WordPress, Joomla etc, as these installations are usually provided as a package, regardless of which hosting platform. Moreover, it is very common to find PHP and MySQL hosted even on Windows shared hosting. However, recall that Windows hosting, even for shared hosting, can be considerably more expensive than Linux hosting. Thus, with everything things being equal, Linux hosting is recommended if you are considering hosting your site in a shared hosting.

Performance and Resources

In terms of processes handling, Linux is known to be better than Windows and it offers more flexibility to manage processes. Linux is also known to be less “resource hungry” and requires lesser memory resources to operate. Thus, for the same memory configuration and server configuration, it is no surprising that Linux hosting offers more “bang for buck”.  Correspondingly, you will find you need higher memory requirements to run Windows. That also partially explains why Windows hosting can be more expensive than Linux hosting.

In Conclusion…Which One to Choose?

There are no conclusive “right or wrong” answers which platform i.e. Windows Hosting or Linux Hosing is a better choice. My recommendation would be:

For shared hosting, I would recommend Linux hosting; simply because of its cost effectiveness. Most hosting companies would have restricted your accesses to a configuration web page with instant installation scripts for 3^rd party applications. So, it wouldn’t make a huge difference, except for the prices.

For dedicated hosting, the choice of the platform would really depend on your technical expertise, your selected development language, your familiarity with the operating systems and how much flexibility and controls you require over the web site. Choose only the platform which you can easily administer and deliver your contents in lighting speed. At the end, it is the content that will bring you traffic and ultimately money, not the choice of platforms.

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Unlike dedicated hosting, shared web hosting packages are commonly promoted nowadays to the tune of $6.95 per month with lots of goodies i.e. “unlimited features” thrown in.  It is in fact an offer too good to miss when you are looking for hosting packages for personal web pages, social blogs or photos sharing etc. But if you are a business owner that owns money making websites, be aware of the risks associated with a shared hosting may inflict considerable damages and threats to your profitability – that’s when cheap dedicated hosting packages fits in to fill the gap.

Common “Shared Issues”

• When you are sharing your site in a shared host, you are in fact sharing your “residence” with a host of other unknown neighbor sites. It is typical of a shared web hosting server (Windows or Linux) to host about 300 – 500 sites per server. You are at the mercy of all those other websites.  All it takes is some faulty application code in one of the neighboring site to bring the whole server to a crawl. Such programming bugs, like memory leaks issues, are often extremely hard to debug and isolate.  Web hosting companies, in order to maintain their service level agreement (SLA) e.g. 99.9% uptime availability, sometimes are forced to cite maintenance reasons to bring the entire server offline for debugging.

• Marginalized bandwidth utilization. You may have been enticed by the “unlimited bandwidth” offered by the hosting plan. “Unlimited” here means your website can consume as much Internet network bandwidth for downloads and uploads. However, bandwidth allocation, throughput and utilization are not guaranteed. Being a shared platform, bandwidth allocation is also shared across all hosted sites, assuming on an equal basis.  If any of the neighboring site gets a huge spike from social websites such as Digg, Mixx or Stumbleupon, your site bandwidth utilization may be marginalized. As a result, your website becomes unresponsive and irks surfers to leave your site immediately. Do not underrate social traffic; it may well overwhelm the entire server in a matter of minutes.

• In the case of shared hosting, do not expect full backup services from the web hosting company. They are only able to schedule a full system backup and very unlikely to entertain your request for site restoration.  The onus of website backup is left to the responsibility of individual owners. Luckily, such backups can sometimes be automated if you are using cpanel hosting.

• Having a shared hosting means sharing everything, including your site IP address, which some may not think this is a big deal. However, it will be a big deal when that IP address is sanctioned by the web community as a spam site. This normally happens when a rogue neighbor site is being black listed by major search and email engines. All originating sites associated with that black listed IP address will suffer as a result i.e. having sent emails listed as spam mails.  It is uncommon for spammers, hackers and blackhat SEOs to use shared hosting sites as experimental feeder sites to their main sites, which not surprisingly, are on dedicated and perhaps anonymous hosts.

In short, there are perils and risks to consider when choosing a shared hosting option. If you are a starting a web business with limited budget, web host sharing can be a perfect candidate. Choose a reputable hosting company for a start and grow your web business from there.  The costs of a dedicated hosting are always the major considerations for site owners.  But if you are operating a profitable website, then you should do some profit analysis and determine if the associated risks of shared hosting is a threat to your profits.  We will discuss how you “measure” your website profitability in future posts.

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