WebMail 
Support 
Should I Host On A Linux Or Windows Hosting Provider?
While choosing a web hosting provider for your hosting business, it’s very important to choose a correct one as hundreds of companies are competing in the market. Wrong selections of company with whom you going to host can actually make you lose lots of your revenues and energy being spent. This can be avoided by spending some time to evaluate the available options.
Whenever it comes to select a web hosting provider foremost thing which needs to be considered is what operating system you will go for to run your application.
What kind of pages your website will contain?
In case you are planning to host standard HTML pages and nothing else then you don’t need to think about which operating you should go for as HTML pages can be served from both Windows hosting Provider and a Linux hosting provider.
But in case if you are planning to develop your website to create dynamic, database driven web pages you need to do some research. For example you are building website that sell phone card. In this case you need to show list of phone cards from database then it is considered as database driven website. You also need to see whether you will use some special back end software languages. And if this is the case than choosing a correct web hosting provider becomes crucial.
If you are using languages like PHP, Perl or CGI for your website than you should go for Linux hosting provider. On the contrary if you are using languages like ASP, ASP.NET, or other Microsoft based languages than you should go for Windows hosting provider as these Microsoft technologies won’t run on Linux operating system.
What Type of Database Will Your Web Site Use?
Whenever you have to use database with your website you need to see what type of database you will go for. Microsoft access is pretty inexpensive and easy to use database used in conjunction with websites which works only on Windows hosting provider. However in the case a company provides Linux hosting capabilities only then it won’t work with Windows hosting.
Solution to this access problem is MySQL which can be served from Linux host or a Windows host. MySQL is now being used as a standard database as it can be transferred from one server to another. Moreover many hosting providers have online MySQL tools which enable you to use the database tools without spending any extra money.
JavaScript, Flash and other Multimedia Content
If you are not using any back end languages and data base connectivity than you don’t need to care as to which operating system you web hosting provider uses. Scripts like which function on the “front end” of a web page can be served well from Linux hosting provider or a Windows hosting provider.
Moreover flash or multimedia videos like YouTube videos can be easily put to your webpage irrespective of the operating system that is being used by your web hosting provider.
Costs
Windows being licensed operating system would definitely cause you to pay more for Windows hosting than Linux hosting. If you don’t want to use Microsoft based database or web languages than you go for Linux hosting provider for your website.
Generally Linux hosting will cost you less than $5 per month whereas windows hosting will cost you less than $10 per month. The sum total of $60 extra windows hosting is worth to use in case you want plan to host multiple web sites for your company.
