The differences between UNIX and Windows hosting are fairly large if you are setting up your own server; but for most of you who just need help choosing a low cost web hosting company, the differences really boil down to two factors: cost and personal preference. To sum it up, the cost of hosting your website in a true Windows hosting environment is more expensive, but the Microsoft applications are easier to learn to use. However, once you start using Microsoft products, it can be complicated to take your files and put them to use in a UNIX or Linux operating system; and UNIX is older and used by more hosting companies. UNIX is GNU General Public License software, so it is cheaper and more secure, but you will have to learn more scripting languages to use it to its full potential. Confused? Don’t be. Windows vs. UNIX is still a matter of preference, but why don’t we look at each one in some detail and you will have a better idea of which one would be better for you.
Windows Web Hosting
First of all, don’t misunderstand that if you use Windows as the operating system for your computer that you have to use a Windows hosting platform. The two have nothing to do with each other. Windows hosting is simply a hosting environment that uses Microsoft products in order to make hosting easier and more accessible for the novice web developer. For example, if you are a small business owner and want to set up an ecommerce site as a supplement to your brick and mortar business, you might like Windows products better because there is less coding to learn. This is assuming you have absolutely no plans of ever going into web development and ecommerce fulltime as your primary business. As a part-time web developer, Windows products or UNIX along with other scripting programs produce the same result. It’s just that with Windows you can get started faster because some of the wizards do most everything for you. Also, if you aren’t going into web development, you may want to concentrate more on your business and sales than on working on your web site and Windows gives you hands-on abilities without bogging you down with learning coding.
Windows hosting starts with the Microsoft Internet Information Server, and with a low cost web hosting package you should get software like…
- ASP (Active Server Pages)
- .NET Framework
- MS Access databases
- MS SQL databases
- FrontPage support
If your hosting package seems light on this kind of software, you should look for another Windows hosting company, because with Windows, every application has to be purchased separately because of the Windows licensing fees. That’s why it’s more expensive. The FrontPage software that you use to create your website won’t be included in most hosting packages so that is also something you will have to buy for yourself.
In spite of the cost, what Windows hosting does for you is pretty incredible. Once you’ve purchased everything, you can build dynamic web pages without a lot of computer programming experience. This is as opposed to using a free site builder from a cheap web hosting company, where the pages are basically just an assembly of pictures and texts.
A low cost web hosting package with a Windows hosting environment will let you:
- create interactive forms
- insert video and audio easily
- create links
- work with databases
- create drop-down menus
- create roll-over buttons
- and help with many other tasks
If you have an ecommerce site, let’s face it; these are all of the elements that you want to create a professional looking web site.
Microsoft is continually improving its products, as well. ASP (Active Server Pages), which was introduced in 1996, let you create dynamic web pages easier than learning PHP and HTML from scratch, but it still had its drawbacks. ASP was tricky to work with because it still involved too much coding and became difficult to manage from a coding aspect when a web site became too large. So Windows introduces the .Net Framework, which really simplified things. It greatly reduced the amount of coding you would have to learn as a novice and made a server side scripting web site with dynamic pages easier to produce and maintain. In fact, it imitates PHP in the fact that the ASP.NET pages have the execution codes put together with the HTML to produce faster results when a web page is requested by a web browser. This technical side may not interest you so much as the fact that .Net Framework requires much less code to get started and maintain a site than using PHP alone. This is because the .Net Framework does a lot of monitoring and automatic repair for you. This is a big difference from UNIX, where you must monitor and repair code and security breaches on your own. Not understanding how to maintain code on your UNIX-hosted web site can cause problems if you do not know what you are doing.
If this still sound too complicated for you, Windows has an even easier web hosting solution for you: Microsoft FrontPage. With Microsoft FrontPage hosting, you have enough wizards to help you create incredible looking dynamic web pages and a fully interactive website without knowing a line of code. For the most part, creating the functions of your site involves pointing and clicking your way through drop-down menus and design wizards. With FrontPage, you can accomplish what a professional web developer can with almost no knowledge of computer programming. In fact, for the most part, FrontPage will even fix your mistakes and monitor your site with routine updates that will check for things like broken links, with very little effort on your part.
So you may be asking, “If FrontPage is so great, why bother with UNIX at all?” That’s a good question.
Let’s talk about Microsoft’s drawbacks first, and then we’ll get into the benefits of UNIX. The biggest drawback to Windows hosting is that it costs more than UNIX hosting. Microsoft produces software to make a profit, and while it is quicker and easier to learn, you have to pay for that convenience. This means that whenever Microsoft introduces new software, you have to pay for it and the older version won’t necessarily be compatible with the new one. For example, when ASP was introduced, it had some problems. Microsoft fixed those problems with ASP.NET, but in order to benefit, you had to buy ASP.NET even though you had also paid for ASP. As well, while ASP.NET can read ASP files, ASP cannot read ASP.NET files. The same incompatibility holds true if you try to use Microsoft products with other applications. For instance, if you try to use FrontPage in a Linux hosting environment, you can get FrontPage extensions to help out. Also, you might find many more viruses aimed specifically at Microsoft products. The IIS platform isn’t necessarily less secure than other platforms like UNIX and Linux, it just gets attacked more.
In a nutshell, that covers Windows hosting, so now let’s look at UNIX. UNIX is the older operating system platform, and is open source software, which means that it is free and continually updated. That also makes it much cheaper all around than Windows. Along with Linux, UNIX also works with most all of the other open source scripting languages, so you have quite a bit more freedom when it comes to designing your site. If you sign up for a much more affordable UNIX hosting plan, look for Java applications, MySQL databases, PHP 4 or 5, Perl, and other related open source applications. These applications together will produce the same results as the Microsoft products, the main difference being that once you develop code it belongs to you – and unlike Microsoft, you are free to take it with you wherever you like because it will work with most other open source hosting environments. This is because the updates from these organizations are free and easily found on the Internet.
The disadvantage with UNIX that you will initially face is that you will have to learn computer languages that will take time to master. Many people who are using a UNIX or Linux platform right now have had some continuing education in computer science and may even have had a few years of college. Don’t let that discourage you. There are enough tutorials and blogs out there to help you learn how to use scripting languages. If you are serious about UNIX and really learning web development, a good way to get started is to get a cheap web hosting package and use their free sitebuilder to build a web site. It won’t immediately have everything that FrontPage will provide you, but it also doesn’t cost a small fortune. Take this time to learn all of the basics of site design and site organization and learn the rest as you go along. If you are serious about ecommerce and multiple web sites, learning to build sites from the ground up is really the only way to go. In the long run, you will have more control over your site and won’t rely on help from others or be stuck paying for updates every time they come out.
When it comes to choosing Windows hosting or UNIX it boils down to how much time you have to learn computer scripting language and how much you are willing to spend on software. If you have the money and need to get an ecommerce site started right away, go for Windows, but if you have some time and want to learn web hosting form the ground up UNIX is a better choice.
