Which operating system is suitable to host my web site?Back to the main help page Nowadays, many kinds of operating systems are used to host web sites. The most common ones are Windows and Unix. Windows servers include Windows NT4, Windows 2000, and Windows 2003. Unix is not an operating system itself; it's a name for a brand of operating systems including the following operating systems: Solaris from Sun Microsystems HP-UX from Hewlett Packard IRIX from Silicon Graphics (SGI) AIX from IBM Sco, from Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. BSD from BSDI FreeBSD, a free version of BSD OpenBSD, another free version of BSD GNU/Linux, a semi-Unix environment written by Linus Torvalds, using GNU tools. It is distributed by several vendors, such as Caldera, Corel, Debian, Mandrake, RedHat, Slackware, Storm, SuSE, Turbo Linux, and Yellow Day.
The Unix systems have longer history than Windows. The first Unix systems were created at the late 60s and early 70s, whereas server editions of Windows only date back to the 90s. One of the most widely used Unix systems is GNU/Linux, which is commonly known as Linux. This operating system, like the rest of the Unix family, is included from two main parts, the kernel, and system tools. The kernel of this operating system is written by Linus Torvalds, and its tools are created in the GNU project. This operating system is "free," in the sense that you don't have to pay any money to use it, and users can also modify its source code to accommodate to their needs with no restriction. This has lead to a team as large as the worldwide users of this operating system take part in its development and debugging, making it an operating system with extraordinary power and reliability. What follows is a comparison between Windows and GNU/Linux servers: Ease of Use: After such a long time that both these systems have been used, there is no noticeable difference in ease of use between these two systems. Actually, the ease of use and administering these systems is only determined by the skills of its users. There are two points worth mentioning here: firstly, Linux servers have easier and more secure remote administration capabilities than their Windows counterparts, and secondly, since both systems use common and standardized protocols, such as FTP, to administer a single site, there are no real differences for the users of these systems. So, the operating system you use at home or office should not have any impact on the operating system you use to host your web site. Reliability: Linux servers are far more reliable than Windows servers, and this goes to such an extent that Windows servers are not used in virtually any real-life project which has network security as a big concern. Unlike what people might believe, the security holes in Windows server systems have not been fully closed with newer releases of this operating system. As an example, Microsoft was promising its users that their new Windows 2003 server will be this company's "most secure server operating system ever" before its release, but in a time span shorter than a month, and after discovering hundreds of security holes in their new product, Microsoft officials admitted their mistake.
Of course, that does not mean that Linux servers are 100% secure, or Windows servers are never used. We only aim at a comparison between the two. Speed: These two systems have little difference in speed; however, Linux systems are a bit speedier because of the capability of disabling every part of the operating system. For example, generally, server systems do not need to have a graphical environment loaded, and command line applications are used to monitor and administer them, but Windows servers can't have the graphical environment disabled, and that consumes system resources, of course. Functionality: There are very little things that one system can do and the other can't. The difference is in the tools used to perform each operation. As an example, the most widely used web server software for Linux (and for the whole Internet web servers, for that matter) is Apache, while on Windows, IIS is mostly used. The nice point is that most Linux tools have been ported to Windows as well, but very little tools have been ported from Windows to Linux. This is a proof that the Linux tools are more useful. Usage of Hardware System Resources: Linux systems consume system resources (such as memory and CPU) far more conservatively than Windows systems. A Linux server can easily be installed on a 486 PC with 16MB of RAM, but one can't even imagine such a hardware for running a Windows server. This causes a Linux system to have more free resources, and hence more power, when installed on the same hardware as a Windows system. Free Resources with Source Code: Most Linux software are free, and their source code is also accessible. This causes Linux servers to be both cheaper and easier to fix in case of a problem, because a Linux system administrator can obtain the source code of the software, and fix it herself, should the system encounter any problem, whereas a Windows system administrator must wait as long as several months for the vendor to ship a patch or fix for the software. Microsoft Products' Compatibility: This is an undeniable fact that most desktop computers in the world use Windows. This causes supporting Microsoft products to be accounted as an advantage for a server. Linux servers currently support many of these products, such as ASP, Microsoft FrontPage Server Extensions, etc., and the support for many other technologies (such as .NET) is also under development.
According to the reasons listed above, Farda Technology offers its hosting products on GNU/Linux servers. The security software we use, Firon 8.1, is also GNU/Linux-based. We believe that GNU/Linux servers provide the best features for our customers, yet at the lowest cost. Back to the main help page |
