Linux Web Hosting or Windows Web Hosting? Most of us are used to seeing Microsoft’s Windows platform in our daily lives. There is no doubt about the fact that Windows is the operating system of choice for majority of the people because of its ease of use.
Though Linux is also now available in many powerful and beautiful graphical user interfaces. But still Windows continue to role the client side desktop computing.
But when you are in search of web hosting for your blog or website. Everybody will be recommending Linux web hosting. The natural questions coming to your mind is: Why Linux Web Hosting? Why not Windows Web Hosting?
Why Linux Web Hosting?
Given below are some of the important reasons linux web hosting is all the rage and windows webhosting is not even in the competition:
Price Factor
You might already be knowing that Linux Operating system is freeware. Which means that there is no licensing cost for web hosts to use it. Compare this to Windows Server OS licensing costs and the CALS etc.
And you will know that website hosts are saving thousands of dollars by going for Linux based web servers. There is no match between something free and something costing thousands of dollars.
Linux More Suited for Web Hosting Business
The design of Linux enables it to deliver phenomenal performance even under low memory and CPU. In comparison a Windows Web Server requires lots of computing resources for the OS itself. Any Windows Web server can not be imagined with less than 1GB RAM whereas a fully functional Linux web server can be installed even under 512MB RAM.
Moreover, Linux works efficiently even under high user load whereas Windows is known for sluggish performance under higher user loads.
Ideally Suited for Open Web
Linux itself is free therefore all the open source server software ( PHP, MySQL, WordPress, Joomla etc ) support Linux based Hosting right out of the box without any tweaking required. Since developers ideally create these open freeware software for Linux systems, they work more efficiently on Linux Web Hosting.
There are many other reasons as well in answer to the question of why Linux Web Hosting. But in short more than 90 per cent of the world’s websites run on Linux based hosting. And users also benefit from this because they can easily get Linux based hosting under 5 dollars per month (even cheaper if you search well ). Whereas a Windows Hosting package is a lot more costlier.
One thing you should keep in mind that it is immaterial whether you use Windows computer at home or Linux because you will be managing your hosting still using your own Windows based computer. You will not need to learn Linux at all for using your hosting.
I hope this answers your basic questions about why Linux over Windows? Check our Web Hosting Guide to learn more about selecting a web hosting plan for your websites .