Linux web hosting is a very stable web hosting platform than Windows web hosting. The advantages of Linux web hosting come from its reliability, security and price.
In the case of reliability, there have been documented cases that a Linux web hosting servers can run for one year without downtime. On the other end, Windows web hosting often need to be rebooted on a scheduled base, which make Linux web hosting a more reliable web hosting platform.
Linux web hosting is continually evolving patches to make Linux web hosting operating system more stable. As a result, Linux web hosting provides a greater degree of security than most other web hosting platform.
Price is another advantage of Linux web hosting, since Linux web hosting platform is an open source system, Linux web hosting plans are always a cheap web hosting solution.
Linux web hosting has the disadvantage of not being able to accommodate with Windows-based applications. Microsoft products like ASP, FrontPage extensions and the like cannot be run perfectly at Linux web hosting servers.
On the other hand, Windows web hosting is generally easier than Linux web hosting to get started and can integrates better with Microsoft applications including FrontPage extensions, ASP and Microsoft SQL server, etc.
Featured Linux Web Hosting Article
Just the Right Size
Deciding on which website host before you know what you will actually be putting in your website is like putting the cart before the horse. It's a silly idea, and it just will not work. Different site content have different sizes, and will need different applications in order to be accessible and intelligible. Text content for example do not require a lot of bytes, but if you're planning on graphics, pictures and video streaming, that's another story.
The latter will eat up huge amounts of bandwidth and storage space, and if it is more than the bandwidth and storage allocation that your server subscription has allocated to you, they can refuse to upload your website or charge you extra.
On the other hand, there are servers that will tell you that they will allocate an impressive number of gigabytes and bandwidth in hopes that you will never use all of it. Of course they offer the same thing to all the other subscribers and if all of the subscribers manage to use up all that is allocated to them, that server host might not be able to keep up with the demand.
The key in looking for the hosting provider with the best fit would not be to get the cheapest hosting provider that will try to overwhelm you with size alone. Like in all things in life, performance and reliability matters as much as size.
It's not that hard to compute the size of a website, all that one has to do is add the bytes of all the components and multiply that sum with the expected traffic or number of visits. This is how you can compute the bandwidth that your site will need, as well as the storage space.
Bandwidth is not to be confused with the capabilities that you will need for data transfer, however. To compare it to something more substantial, the bandwidth is the electric wire and the data transfer would be the electrical charge running through it. So if you're expecting to have a lot of data running to and from your site, you should have plan with a lot of bandwidth or the traffic will slow down or choke up. With the possibility that your visitor has ADHD, then that means one customer that you've lost because the size of the bandwidth was not enough.
There are ways of optimizing the space that is allotted to you like compressing files, or having an image host. But the simplest way would be to downsize your sites content to only what is necessary to get your message across. To be absolutely sure about your website's needs in terms of bandwidth, ask your server host how much you need with the parameters that you can specify.