Could you please tell me which hosting is better - Windows, Unix or Linux? And why?

you could always read the "hosting guide" on the site in your signature.

Originally Posted by chrishirst

you could always read the "hosting guide" on the site in your signature.

You forgot to add a link

The type of hosting you need depends entirely on the set of tools that you will be using to develop your web site. If you're going to go open source, then use a LAMP stack. If you want to use asp.NET, then you'll have to go with a Windows box.

It all depends on what you need. Linux is obviously more affordable than windows hosting and has been generally accepted by the hosting community.

I am a HUGE fan of Linux and not such a fan of Windows.

Here's why.
1. LAMP FTW (in other words, Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP for the win). The reason why I say that is because a wide variety of applications are PHP/MySQL powered (think WordPress, many open source applications, and a whole lot more) and Linux just feels like a more stable server environment than Windows. I used to work at a Windows hosting facility and I also worked at a Linux hosting facility. At the Windows hosting facility, we'd do monthly "patching the Windows servers" updates and would HAVE to reboot the computers. Sometimes they wouldn't come up and our enterprise customers would be really out of luck. When it comes to patching Linux, it's only when you need to patch the kernel that you require a reboot, and that happens very rarely. My Linux server uptime is over 100 days (and I've seen more than a year).

2. Windows stability sucks. I've explained that a bit in the previous paragraph, but it deserves its own mention. Think about how often you reboot your computer. You may not want to sometimes, but you have to. Think about if you're running webapps on it! Linux stuff is great because most of it is running in the background and it's just more fun for administration, gaining skills, and more.

3. IIS and .htaccess = nonexistent without ISAPI filter. In other words, out of the box, your site is harder to SEO.

4. ASP is not as predominant as PHP. ASP = Windows, PHP = Windows and Apache/Linux, but better with Linux.

5. Look at the Netcraft April 2008 statistics and make up your mind. The second graph is the pertinent one. Apache is still more popular than Windows (but I'll admit, Windows is closing in on Apache... very shocking to me and I'd give everyone who chooses Windows hosting the same lecture I just gave here)

Linux has cooler control panels IMO, like cPanel

Actually, cPanel / Plesk I believe have created control panels for both.

Back in 2003/2004, this wasn't the case.

i perfer linux hosting better, as some hosts give u access to both cron and the shell

Its depend on your requirement, if you are using .net you should buy windows hosting. Linux supports php and others

Linux better, because it allows you to host amazing programing things. I'm big fan of it.

I'm for Linux, work with it.

Originally Posted by 3DProf4online

Could you please tell me which hosting is better - Windows, Unix or Linux? And why?

Unix AND Linux hands down
why? reliability

Originally Posted by ephasenetworks

Actually, cPanel / Plesk I believe have created control panels for both.

Back in 2003/2004, this wasn't the case.

Plesk 6.5 for Windows was released in November 2003 and therefore is a fairly mature product now. However, cPanel's Windows panel hasn't been released yet afaik? I believe it's set for beta during 2008...

Regarding the OP question, it's all about the functionality you require: if you need ASP/.NET or MSSQL then you need Windows hosting (strictly speaking, you could use Linux hosting, and connect to some other MSSQL server - but that's besides the point ), otherwise I'd agree with the general consensus that *nix is the better option.

However, a few words of caution:

1. Most of the opinions about Windows vs. *nix are heavily influenced by the desktop product line of Windows which, historically, wasn't the most stable OS to say the least - as I'm sure you've experienced. However, I would say that Windows 2000/XP/Vista have all improved on this significantly compared to (for example) Windows 95. Likewise in server terms, Windows Server 2003 is a nice improvement on Windows 2000, and MS are clearly keen to retain/grow their server market (as the fact they developed .NET demonstrates!).
2. One reason why Windows Server never quite managed to die out (IMO) is because there are a lot of corporates who enjoy the "reassurance" of having a commercial vendor (MS) at the end of a phone line, responsible for every line of code they're running; even with the commercial Linux operations (e.g. RedHat) the same cannot be said about that, and there are a number of corporates who are therefore nervous about the idea of using open source software (Linux rather than Windows).
3. The other (related!) reason for corporate reluctance to move from Windows to Linux is because of all the legacy code/applications they have - all the VBScript stuff, ASP etc. which they couldn't migrate; they'd need to rewrite it.

Which hosting? I prefer Linux, unless you use asp pages. It's cheap and best

Linux has some amazing features that the other types of hosting can't provide. never would think to change.

linux hosting is more stable than windows.

I think that it is quite difficult to say in general which one ids the best, but people prefer LAMP web hosting and that is quite understable.

It really depends on your site software and what it runs on.

Good luck with your choices.

Originally Posted by chrishirst

you could always read the "hosting guide" on the site in your signature.

I will consider all opinions and add the article on this topic to my "hosting guide" section soon ))