Unix or Windows based hosting?

07/31/2007

David Brown

Unix or Windows (actually IIS) are different types of operating systems that run hosting servers. The operating system does the heavy lifting parts of software jobs, talking to the hardware guts, managing connections to the internet, allocating resources, scheduling tasks and jobs and other things you probably do not want to know about and should not need to worry about. Unix is one of the oldest and most widely used operating systems, and most versions of Unix are free. A great deal of free software has also been written for these systems, and a lot of online support is available for them, and software written for one Unix system will usually work for another system. There are also a lot of Web design people who know the Unix system well and can write a lot of good software quickly using Unix-supported languages and databases. It is true, however, that very often the documentation for "open systems" software leaves a lot to be desired. Apache and Linux are two of the most popular brand names of operating systems. Microsoft has developed its own proprietary IIS system which runs on NT and Windows server platforms. Microsoft extensions include many powerful tools such as FrontPage extensions .COM, .NET, MS-SQL, Microsoft access, asp technology and Visual basic. These tools allow web designers to write up problematic and complex tasks quickly and easily. However, they are not needed for most applications. Windows-based servers do not have a great reputation for reliability, and have more "security holes" than Unix-based systems. ASP and FrontPage extensions can be run on many Unix based servers. Unless you already have an application that uses asp, .COM, .NET, MS-SQL, Access or Visual Basic, the consensus is that Unix-based systems such as apache are preferable.