In an earlier writeup on website hosting, I said we recommended Unix hosting but didn’t say why.
The biggest reason is security. Unix servers are inherently more secure against hacking, than Windows servers. We’ve had exactly one instance of a website being hacked in the years we’ve been offering hosting services. It is also the only website that we hosted on a Windows server. No coincidence. We no longer offer Windows hosting.
The other reason is that some things are just easier to do on a Unix server, in the typical setup called “LAMP” for Linux – Apache – MySQL – PHP. Linux is a version of Unix. Apache is the widely used web server software. MySQL is the type of data base and PHP is a programming language. All of these are very widely used and there are lots of people who know how to do things with them. Furthermore, they are free and open-source (open to development and additions by anyone who wants to help).
So they aren’t subject to the kinds of changes that Microsoft products are – where the pressure to develop new salable products leads to jumps from one version to another.
To give one example, when we are redesigning a website, and the client hosts on Windows, there are four different versions of the code possible for generating emails from the website (as when someone fills out a contact form). Usually there is no way to find out which will work on their server other than by trial and error.
In the case of Unix hosting, there is only one version, and it always works.
Unix versus Windows Website Hosting
