The question about which hosting platform is better, Linux or Windows, seems pretty straight at first glance for anyone, people who familiar with Windows while not knowing too much about GNU/Linux or only knows Windows will definitely tell you: Windows is the first and foremost choice, these people will demand Windows hosts even they don’t know anything about hosting. And people with clue will know there are no comparison between these two hosting platforms, from system efficiency, cost effective, reliability and security point of view, it seems that Windows hosting is only for specialized hosting needs, if you need some Windows only applications to run on the host, otherwise there is no reason to choose Windows hosts.

I haven’t been doing hosting thingy for too long, maybe only a little less than one year, I used to run all my blogs and server side stuff on my own servers, we have dedicated servers and in house servers are all running Linux, mostly CentOS, so you may say that I have a bias against Windows, and it’s true, in our office we run everything on Linux, but it doesn’t mean I don’t know Windows, I’ve been running Win XP in virtual machine for maybe 5 years, for testing purpose, the reason I don’t want to touch Windows on physical hardware is that it’s too fragile and weak, I just can’t put it to serious use without banging my head against the wall at least 10,000 times. Now I revealed my background, let’s get back to the topic. Why I or you should choose Linux Hosting? Aside from reasons mentioned in the first paragraph, what else make the Linux hosting better than other hosts? I don’t have too much experience with Windows hosts so I will tell my web hosting story.

About 11 month ago, I needed to create a lot different websites, and I didn’t want to put all those websites on our own servers, so I looked around for cheap and reliable hosting, almost every Web Hosting site has Linux hosts and Windows hosts available, though two options had different prices, for me it was Linux all the way, in order to diversify hosting sites, I signed up with at least 8 different web hosting companies, and I always choose the cheapest option, which usually ran $3-$4 a month, and all hosts were running Linux. Some of the hosts were faster than others, some of them offered SSH, some offered SSH but would ask for picture ID, some simply had no such option available, and they almost all were using cpanel. Up until now, my experiences with all these hosts are most pleasant, some of them had outage, server misconfiguration, but all problems were dealt with quickly and painless. The available options and functionality are more than enough for my needs(I build ecommerce sites and forums), and the up time and speed are mostly good, especially there are two of them offer unmatched speed, that’s amazing considering I only pay around $4 a month. Last but not least, all hosts except one  offer everything unlimited, unlimited addon domains, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited database, unlimited disk space, I feel it’s good to go with hosting now(I used to despise the idea to host your sites on someone else’s server.)!

So far my hosting experience are pretty positive, and I believe this won’t change in the near future, so I fully endorse Linux hosting, while I have no idea about Windows hosting, just reasonable guess, first you pay more when you choose Windows hosting, second I guess you need Windows desktop to properly manage your hosts, it’s a big risk if you ask me. So for me it’s Linux hosting any day.

I probably will do a full review about 8 hosts I am using right now, including management(no big difference, all cpanel based except one), accessibility, speed, reliability, adaptability, flexibility, long term usability(I will keep using them for at least another 2-3 years), customer service, technical support, etc., Stay tuned!

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