There are more things to servers than just plain web hosting. Out of the 15% market share of Windows servers, about 10 % are application servers and only the other 5% comes to Web Hosting. If you have a large company that has various branches around the world, and would like to keep the billing cnetralized, instead of hosting a server in your own office, paying for the internet and maintaining it, you could get it from a datacentre in the US, who would take care of everything for you in the hardware side.

These servers can be pointed to by a domain name, and an email service be installed in it, and the application that has been designed to take care of the billing or anything that it is supposed to take care of is installed on the server. When a billing PC of the associated company in any part of the world needs to fetch data, which would always be connected to the internet, it will do so from the centralized data on the server.

Logistics companies use centralized servers to run theri tracking applications, and make it available on their websites for the clients to view the progress. Airline companies, shipping companies, railways and even bus companies run their ticket booking services thru a server, and it is no longer thru phones thru which bookings are confirmed between various stations that a bus would pass thru.

Most of the application servers that I have seen are on Windows, as windows seems to be good at running single sites, if it is protected well from viruses. It comes with a remote desktop and it is easier to mange. And as long as Windows is only used by a closed group of users who know what they are doing, it is safe enough.

Have I told you that I was using Windows XP from 2002 to 2005 without a single virus infection, or having the need to format the hard drive, and that too without any virus, spyware or adware protection? Thats because I have always known the problems with windows, and what not to do to save it from getting my PC into trouble. Though I couldnt do much of that for my servers, since it was on a multi user environemnt and I had no control over the files that the clients would upload and share.

When I was active in Indyahozting, I was too much worried about server loads. Because it was something that affected all clients, and I hated it when servers crossed a total usage of 75%, which would make all sites on the server slow. There were not much of a problem on the Linux servers, but Windows servers always used to give me a hard time.

Right now, Im in a quest to make all my automated blogs work in full effecienty. I was hosting them on a shared hosting account, but now I have taken a dedicated server from iweb where all those blogs are hosted. And I am amusing myself in finding that the server is running at full effecienty, and that all the pho sites are always busy updating the blogs with articles round the clock, and serving the search engine visitors. The network lines are always busy, and the server’s processor is always at about 90%, and the memory usage is at 1.8 gb out of the 2 GB that it has got.

I dont believe in loading the hard disk though, since that would naturally slow down the server with lots of data. So I have dedicated one disk for the databases alone, and one for the files and logs and stuff. All of them are wordpress sites, and wordpress sites only work with databases a lot, so the 2nd hard drive for sure is getting a lot of work for itself. And a backup of the 2nd drive is constantly being taken in the first drive.

I am worried only about the databases since the php is the same for all the 85 sites that the server hosts, and they all use the very same wordpress templates. So if that is lost nothing is lost. If the databases are lost something is lost, and never is everything lost, since all the site sites that are hosted on the server are automated and get updated by themselves.

If you choose to offer shared hosting from a web server that you own or have rented, you need to think twice, and primarily have the operating system on the server in mind. There are various distributions of Linux such as Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOs, Red Hat, FreeBSD etc that you could use in the linux or unix like platforms. This is one part, and the other is Our Very Own Bill Gate’s Creation, the Crappy Old Microsoft’s Windows NT (Doesn’t)Work Station based Windows 2000 or Windows 2003 Server Edition.

Fortunately, unlike the PC market, Linux domainates the server industry completely. Nearly 85% of all web servers run on linux. Server Admins like linux since it is trouble free, is a lot stable, wont crash like windows does, is a lot secure, and is a lot efficient. But still, Microsoft Enthusiasts who wish to make their websites only with ASP and MSSQL server, should opt only for windows, since Linux doesnt really support it.

Linux is the best server operating system. There is Solaris ofcourse, and there are mainframes, but when it comes to shared web hosting on 32 or 64 bit servers, it is linux that rocks, and not really windows.

But still, a restaurant that serves Chicken should serve toothpicks as well. So, if you run a hosting company, give priority to linux, and keep the number of windows server on your portfolio minimal. The best way to reduce demand for windows hosting is to keep the price of windows packages extremely high. If the price is something like double that of the price you offer linux hosting for, no one would go for windows naturally unless they really need it.

Likewise, the costs for Windows servers are certainly higher than that of linux servers with all those license fees and stuff. You are literally paying Microsoft for the bugs that they have put in their operating systems, and not for any quality that they have put in their work on the Operating System that they have put up for sale.

1. Linux servers dont need defragmentation. Windows needs that every week, and when your server runs 24×7, you cant really find time or the resources to do the defrag, and when you are doing that, you will find that the sites that you have hosted on the server are really really slow.

2. Linux doesnt need a virus scanner. Windows needs a minimum of 2 virus scanners running on them to monitor the sites and the files that are being uploaded and downloaded from the sites. This consumes considerable processor and memory resources.

3. Linux servers dont need a restart at all. They can run without restarts for months together without any problems. I havent restarted my server for atleast 4 months If im right. I ofcourse restart the services from the server such as SMTP server POP3, Apache etc from the services management, but have never rebooted the server once in the past 4 months or even more. And I restart my Windows server every day. You will see a downtime of 7 Mins every day if you are following the uptime rating of the sites on the server. There is no other way. The server has to be restarted. The Ram completely craps up the server speed, and restarting the services or any operation doesnt help. Only a full server reboot, that results in a complete shutdown of all sites for 7 minutes would help.

4. The best security feature of Linux is that it comes with all its ports closed by default while being installed. You will have to open a port if you need to use it, and if it remains unused for quite some time, it will automatically get closed. That is the best security feature that Linux has. You cannot hack into a Linux server easily. Windows installs with all ports wide open and inviting, and to close them and monitor them, you need to install port monitoring software, which costs money, and resources.

5. The Linux file system never fails or crashes. Windows File System can fail at any time. Linux file systems are very easy on the hard drives, and work hard to keep the drives cool and give longer life to them and keep your data safe. Windows tortures the hard drives just as Hitler tortured the Jews. You can test this yourself on your local PC, install LInux and listen to the sounds that the hard disk produces during normal operation, and chekc the same after installing Windows. You can literally hear it screaming.

6. Linux is a trillion times better when it comes to parallel processing than Windows. So on a server that is shared between clients, everyone would be using a part of the resources, and the resource allocation is a lot simpler in Linux than in Windows, and therefore, the load on the processor is lesser, and you get better results on the performance.

7. There is nothing much that you cannot do on a Linux server thru SSH, and on Windows, you cant do a thing with the Console that they provide, and most of the time you will need to get on to the remote desktop to run command Line instructions.

8. Linux is best for mails. Everything is free and open source. Just install linux on your server and install Exim, and your mail server is ready. In windows, you can go for the free Mail Enable, which sucks completely, or you can pay that huge license fee and get a Microsoft Exchange Server License, which is, by default, filled with bugs as always.

9. Linux is perfect for file server and ftp server requirements. It can manage any number of hard drives connected to the server with ease, and with absolutely no struggle. Windows suffers a lot in managing 2 hard drives parallely. Though they say Windows 2008 does support large number of Hard Drives, I still think it cannot match Linux. Then again, distribution of multiple files on the ftp server to multiple clients can be handled well only by Linux, and Windows wont do that at all. It will struggle and it will make the server struggle.

10. Linux supports PHP, CGI, Perl etc, while windows supports all these ad ASP and MSSQL. People done really realize that these software released by Microsoft are full of bugs, and most of them are intentionally placed. SQL is the same everywhere. MySql is free, and it doesnt mean that it is insecure, and just because MSSQL comes with an expensive license means that it is secure. Banks and other people who are serious about their data never go for MSSQL. They go straight to Oracle. So who does need MSSQL? No one really. Microsoft is just a company that produces software that really should be banned. There are better software in Open Source. And people who really dont understand this go for ASP and MSSQL, while they dont realize that PHP can do better than these.

Summer is the best time of the year. I love it more than anything. No rain, no cold, its happy and its hot. Everyone around you is on vacation, and the spirit boosts up everyone, and its the best time to travel with friends.

Taking a cruise on your vacation should be one of the coolest things that you could do. Cruiselocators.com is a website where you can locate some luxury cruises to various destinations around the world and TravelStoreUSA.com gives you other holiday packages.

If you own a company, and have people working under you whom you would want to retain, send them on a vacation and just buy travel gift certificates for them, and they will stick with you for a few more years.