Unix Hosting
What is UNIX Hosting?
Unix Web Hosting
UNIX hosting is the most common web hosting platform today. The term itself refers to a computer operating system which provides the base operating system architecture for many open source companies including Solaris (Sun), Linux (GNU) and others. This hosting solution is considered more available due to open source distribution of its operating system. Primarily, it is a choice between PHP and ASP, in which the former comes with UNIX hosting while the latter comes with Windows hosting. This enables an increased websites per server ratio, resulting in a decrease of cost of hosting. Naturally for this reason, this hosting type is normally cheaper than Windows hosting.
Also, when considering the operating system and hosting, users need to consider their own technical abilities. There’ll be some minimal time required on learning the basics before you can fully utilize the advantages of this hosting environment.
In conclusion, the UNIX hosting solution should be your choice if you are using PHP scripting for your website, and also if your website is pretty basic with mainly HTML language. - by Mer Amer
Windows or Unix (Linux) Web Hosting - Which is the Best Choice?
Unix (and Linux variants) and Windows are the two main operating systems powering web servers today, and each operating systems has its own unique features, and this brings their own advantages and disadvantages.
Unix Overview
Today most web developers choose Unix systems to host their websites, everyday Windows loses more ground to Unix in market share in the web hosting market, why is this the case? Web hosting providers typically use free editions of Unix based Linux operating systems such as Debian, Red Hat, or Free BSD, this alone reduces the end cost of a web hosting plan to the consumer due to there being no licensing fees incurred like there is with the Windows operating system.
Unix based operating systems support the following: PHP, MySQL, PostgresSQL, Perl, CGI-BIN, Ruby on Rails and many more.
Windows Hosting Overview
This of course is the most widely known operating system, and as you know, you pay to use the Windows operating system on your desktop, and this is no different when it comes to using the Windows Server operating system. The Windows Server operating system does support some technologies that Unix currently does not. Only Windows hosting plans support scripting languages such as Active Server Pages (ASP), Cold Fusion, Active Perl, C++, C#, and Visual Basic.
Only Windows Server operating system will run Microsoft applications such as Microsoft Access Databases, Microsoft SQL Databases, IIS.
Performance - In low server load conditions Windows and Unix have similar performance, but under high server loads, Unix is superior to Windows.
Price - Any server hosting a website requires an operating system, and the associated licenses to use that operating system. Unix hosting typically offers more stability, better performance, more compatibility, and lower costs compared to a Windows hosting plan. - by David J. Smith
