One of the most confusing decisions someone new to web hosting will have to make is which platform their server should be on. There are a number of different choices out there but the main two are Linux and Windows web servers.So what is main difference between them?

There are a lot of sources of information about hosting, but the majority of them are tainted by the personal opinion unfortunately this is the confusing the issue.

In general it quite probably does not matter which server we use. For the majority of people it will be more important to choose a really good web host than to worry about the server type that they implement.

Microsoft developed and owns the Windows operating system. Linux is open source and generally free. This means it can often be more expensive to set up and run a Windows server.

The cost involved in running a server does not affect the cost of a web hosting package as much as we may think.

Access to our web account will most likely be through FTP or a control panel and both servers support these methods. The main difference is that some of the FTP commands are slightly different between Linux and Windows and some FTP programs will be designed with one or the other in mind.

The large number of peoples looking of web features run fine on both platforms including PHP, mySQL, POP3 etc. If we intend to create our site using ASP, FrontPage, the .NET environment, Windows Streaming Media, Access, MSSQL, or any of the other Microsoft proprietary technologies then we probably need to use a Windows host.

There is limited vote for a number of technologies in Linux, but they can be expensive and are usually lacking in features.

The reliability and stability of the different platforms have been the matter of many arguments. The main reason that Windows is seen as being not so much secure is that it is the most widely used operating system for home computers.

People spend more time looking for flaws in the most common system. With Linux being the most common server type, it has a surprising number of successful attempts made on it.