The first and most important decision that you need to take about your website is which operating system it will be running on. In the next step, you will be choosing the Web hosting company and it is best to make this choice on the basis of the services they have on offer. The two most common web hosting packages offered by companies are Linux Hosting and Windows Hosting. Our article here discusses which one you should be choosing in order to serve your purpose fully.

• Linux Hosting – Linux has long been considered the most reliable and efficient of all servers. However, the question still remains as to what requirements does your website have? What kinds of applications do you plan on using? Linux is known for its ability to remain robust and giving websites a high-up time. The Linux OS is free or at the most very cheap in spite of being a full-fledged server and having the ability to support applications such as DNS Server, FTP, Web Server and File Server. Hosting on Linux servers is easier as compared to Windows and you will be free to use almost any kind of file extensions such as.html, .cgi, .htm, .php, .pl, .shtml, .xml, etc. This gives you freedom to host websites which use different types of scripts such as.pl, .cgi, .php, and .asp. A website at its basic level is just a few pages of html which develops with the increase in the requirements of the customer. A Linux based server website can incorporate a large scale of customer requirements without making any major site design changes.
• Windows Hosting – This is used by webmasters in need of designing dynamic websites and using scripting language such as ASP or ASP.NET. Allowing true integration with Microsoft’s products and allowing web sites to run Active Server Pages, it also allows through Microsoft’s server, integration with SQL database platform which happens to be one of the strongest database solutions. Windows hosting is a good choice for those whose websites run on .net since Linux hosting does not provide compatibility with these languages. If you are using a well-known program for web designing, such as Microsoft Front Page, your job will be simplified by the use of Windows Hosting. There will be no hassles related to making support extensions for server like MySQL, MS SQL, ASP.NET, ASP, etc. If you website is in need of an access database, you will be able to achieve this through a Windows server in a better way. Though there are many options for database creation and maintenance such as MySQL, Access is the preferred choice for many and a Windows server makes this integration much easier. Those of you, who need a dynamically driven website and want to use .ASP or Active Server Pages, will be better off choosing a Windows OS. .ASP is not supported by Linux OS and thus you are not left with any other option.