Why pay more with Windows hosting?

It is the age old debate. You need web hosting for your company, should you use a Linux server or use a Windows server? If you are new to web hosting, you may instinctively go for windows since you will recognise the brand name.

Why should you use windows? There are many disadvantages of using a windows based server. These are the first three which come to mind:

• Cost. Windows based web hosting is typically more expensive. For this blog post, we conducted a bit of research. We were unable to find a decent windows web hosting package with databases for under £10 a month. Why is this? Microsoft are greedy, the company charge nearly £1000 for the operating system alone. Popular Linux distributions are free.
• Less secure. How many times this year have your heard about ‘virus’ threats to windows. This affects windows servers also. Viruses on Linux based computers are much less common.
• Stability. From our personal experience, Linux based servers are much more stable. Linux distributions typically have a much lower RAM memory leak over time, this means the server will need to be re-booted less to keep it running faster
• Harder to use. Plesk and other windows based web hosting control panels can be very hard to use and feel a bit daunting to the user at first. The most common Linux control panel (cPanel) is commonly accepted as being much more user friendly.

With windows based servers, you will pay more, it will be less secure and typically harder to use than the Linux alternative. To us it is a simple answer, Linux based web servers are far superior. However this is not just our opinion, have a look on a search engine of your choice. How many windows web hosts can you find compared to Linux ones? Linux has won the datacentre war.

You should only opt for a windows based web host if you have your heart set on a ASP based website. Linux servers can’t easily run ASP code (there are addons for linux which you can install to run ASP). However the alternative PHP is a much better platform to use! (and its perfect for a Linux web server!)

  Category: web hosting