Question

Should a website hosting really be running Windows server or do respectable Hosting companies run Linux?

Answer

Nearly all website is hosted by Microsoft on Windows servers, but they can be administered by several servers. Most think that Windows servers is cheaper in terms of administrators cost because of the graphical user interface, but total cost of ownership is greater for Windows servers because of the hardware requirements and less MTTF. I say NetWare servers would run without rebooting for 11 months, compared to Windows NT4 and 2000 servers that are lightly loaded and need to be rebooted every week or two, or their processes would not run or slow down due to memory leaks. NetWare and Unix servers, maybe tricky to set up and tune, however they would run without attention. Windows web servers can’t run PHP while Unix servers can on the other hand, execute PHP, a very dynamic server side scripting language.