Why Linux Hosting is gaining more presence than Windows Hosting?
To put your website on the Internet, you require good web hosting. This has, over the years evolved from simple HTML pages with a few images into sophisticated web based hosted applications which are not only interactive but where end users can purchase good and services all over the internet.
Integration of businesses across the world through the Internet in conjunction with Web Based software applications has produced a wide range of web based technologies like ASP, ASP.NET, JSP, PHP among others. These HTML based sites work equally well on both Linux and Windows platforms.
Web hosting platforms vary from different types of operating systems such as Microsoft Windows Server and Redhat Linux which perhaps are the most well known web hosting platforms. Linux is gaining popularity over Windows for several reasons. Linux platform has been developed by Community based efforts and rendered for professional use with the efforts of many IT companies like Red Hat, Suse, Mandrake etc. This combination along with its open source nature has made Linux platform more powerful, inexpensive and secure. Apart from ASP, ASP.NET, all other major web based technologies work well with Linux while the virtually free distribution of PHP, MySQL, PERL has reduced the costs of the website hosting greatly on Linux Server. The robust architecture of the Linux Server also prevents the menace of viruses, spamming and hacking. It is also equipped with several cost effective software which is available for protection on Linux Platform.
The following are the advantages of using Linux based web server over the Windows based web server:
Linux/Unix operating systems has always had a solid reputation of being stable and robust. A web site housed on a Linux operating system is typically known to have very high up-time of 99.9%.
The Linux OS comes free of cost or at least at extremely low costs. Also, it has a full fledged server and desk top applications that come free along with the OS.
When it comes to web hosting, it is easy to host on Linux web servers as it is extremely user friendly. All Linux web servers come with installable Front Page extensions which allow for hosting on a Linux platform. You can use almost all types of file extensions (or scripts) when using Linux web server. Commonly, the following extensions are supported: .cgi, .html, .htm, .pl, .php, .shtml, .xml, and others. Basically it means that you can host web sites that use different types of server side scripts including .cgi, .pl, .php, and .asp (with plug-in).
A web site designed to be hosted on a Linux based web server can be hosted on a Windows web server easily, where as the reverse is not always true. Moreover, a Linux/Unix based web hosting is most popularly used compared to Windows web hosting.
A web site is dynamic, thus scalability and scope for future expansion play a major role in hosting an application. Although, a web site starts with a few pages of HTML, it is like to grow exponentially over a period of time. A web site designed for compatibility with a Linux/Unix based web server meets these requirements easily without making any site wide design changes.
Linux and open source technologies are affordable and within the reach of common man and considered superior to Windows.