Windows Or Linux Web Hosting

Date: January 18, 2008 | Author: Adrian Previtt | Category: Business

When you want your new website on the World Wide Web you’ll need some Web hosting. This proves alarmly complicated when you start to investigate all the different options. If you’re at the stage of deciding the domain name for your business then visit my previous article, What Domain Name Should I Get?

Which host you need comes down to the technology your website will use as there may be specific requirements if you use a database to run, for example, an online shop. Let’s look at the relevant features of Windows and Linux hosting packages.

Windows Hosting

Windows is the operating system we all know and love, or hate. Windows actually provides quite an efficient website hosting service with the benefit of being extremely feature rich. You may or may not know what the technology your website is made of but Windows hosting is primarily for ASP and ASP.Net web scripting. These scripting languages are the tools that website developers use to build complex websites such as shops, content management systems and other applications.

Windows hosting tends to cost slightly more than Linux hosting because licenses need to be bought to operate Windows as a web server. Linux is open source. Not free of conditions but free of costs. Another aspect of Windows is the need for stronger security and updates. As a web server you may find there’s more downtime but maintenance is usually done out of hours and is seamless to most.

So, in essence, Windows provides a scalable, feature laden website hosting service that costs slightly more than Linux.

Linux Hosting

Linux hosting is a very popular hosting platform due to it’s price and ease of maintenance making it a favourite. The technologies that are provided are primarily PHP, Perl scripting and MySQL database. A lot of open source software such as WordPress, this very content management system, use PHP and MySQL.

Although initially we can see there are two disctinct development technologies that hosting platforms can cater for, both can run the other. In other words don’t think that Windows can’t run a PHP and MySQL application like WordPress, this very website uses WordPress, which uses PHP/MySQL and also runs on a Windows hosting server.

So, Windows or Linux Web Hosting?

If you know the technology that is being used to develop the website then you’ll know the best hosting platform to use. If you don’t know the technology then your choice comes down to price and features.

  • If you wish to go cheap, get the smallest Linux package available. This will limit what you can actually do with the website though.
  • If you want cheap but need decent space and may be looking to trade online then get a more expensive Linux hosting package. There are enough web developers out there programming PHP to make use of it.
  • If you want the ultimate in flexibility and the less important than this then consider Windows as a hosting server. Also, be sure that the Windows host comes with PHP and MySQL (many do) and you’ll be sure to cover all bases and be able to call on any web developer to build your site.

What’s All The Other Stuff?

I was hoping you wouldn’t ask but I’ve listed a few of the most popular features and given descriptions for them.

  • Bandwidth - This indicates the amount of data (words and images etc) that can be downloaded in any given month. Basically, the more bandwidth you have the more visitors can be catered for. The main cost of hosting is bandwidth so get as much as you can for the best price.
  • Disk Space - This represents the amount of space there is on your hosting service. If you’ve got lots of images you’ll be surprised how quickly you’ll use this space up. More is better but most hosting packages, even the cheapest, will have enough space for most websites.
  • Own/Fixed IP Address - Only really useful for complex websites, where the website developer informs you of the need for a fixed IP address or you wish to use a SSL certificate on your server.
  • SSL Certificate - This means you can collect credit cards or other private information on your website. Before considering taken online payment and getting SSL, you may find services such as PayPal, WorldPay, Protx etc already provide the SSL anyway so you don’t need to have it.
  • FTP - When you start your browser and type www… you effectively download the Web. Well, someone had to upload what you’re seeing. This is called FTP. FTP sends to the Web, WWW receives it.
  • POP3 Email Account - POP stands for post office protocol. Funny isn’t it? It’s called post office because it delivers mail, well, email. Don’t pay extra for 1000 email address. Who needs 1000 email addresses? If you do then you’ve probably got an IT department tucked away somewhere. Call reception!
  • SMTP - This stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. It effectively means you can use the hosting service to send email and is a recommended and useful feature which is sometimes absent from cheaper hosting packages.
  • Subdomains - These provide a way of changing the first part of a domain name, for example, instead of http://www.pacificatraining.co.uk you could have http://support.pacificatraining.co.uk. Useful for organising your website into different sections.

If you’ve got any other specific questions regarding hosting then hit the web techology forum and ask there.

Adz.

Thanks for reading.