There is no one-word answer to this question, Linux hosting or Windows hosting, which one is better? A basic question asked by all web hosting service buyers, especially those who are beginners and have no prior web hosting experience. The basic factor that should drive your choice of the two options should the variety of content that your site hopes to provide to your audience, the preferred web application choice, the projected traffic and also, among other many factors, the design of the systems control you hope to have.
The first comparison between the two lies in the installation. Linux web hosting installation is pretty easy, making it a preferred choice by many website owners. According to the common myth people assume that because their computer runs Windows they too have to buy Windows hosting package. But this myth is absolutely wrong. You can normally access your web account through FTP or a control panel and both the servers support these methods. But the major difference lies in the FTP commands that are somewhat different in Linux and Windows. In short, occasionally when you try to get your FTP program to do something it returns an error message. Still, this won’t happen very often. Linux and Windows Hosting provide same features that include PHP, MySQL, POP3 and many more. The major difference arises when you want to create your site using Access, Windows Streaming Media, and ASP.NET environment, FrontPage or any other Microsoft technologies. Then you’re bound to use a Windows as your hosting server. However, in Linux there is a limited support for these technologies and what all are available are very expensive.
The next points to argue are the reliability and stability of the servers. Windows is far more insecure in comparison to Linux. Windows is widely used operating system for home PC’s but not Linux. However, Linux is equally insecure as whooping number of successful hack attempts have been made on it till now. Thus, in the end we can say that the security of both the servers usually depends upon the competency of the system administrators. Herein, if you’re security minded then you’ll choose the best and secured hosting company irrespective of the chosen server. Now discussing the performance there isn’t much difference between the two. Linux is faster than Windows as Linux is loaded with extendable implementation.