Lately, Microsoft entered the hosting business with full throttle. The number of Windows servers available on the web for hosting purposes, VPS’s on Microsoft Windows 2003 or DDS’s on MSVS grows quite exponentially.

At this point the end user, the customer does not care much what platform he is hosted on (i.e. Linux or Windows) if he has a simple website, maybe a forum, a blog or something like that because technologies are intertwined: you can get an apache webserver both on windows and linux, and you can get ASP support on Linux. Maybe if he needs some VB applications to run he will definitely need windows based hosting, but that’s about it. He gets FTP to upload files, a control panel (i.e. SWSoft’s Plesk) to manage domains, mail addresses, databases, name servers etc. The main problem here is scalability. Thinking in the future, you need to decide if you are going to expand, and in which direction because you can easily switch from Linux to Windows, but the reverse is not that simple. I would suggest Linux of course, being much more secure, robust and efficient.

Today I had to delete 1 folder on a windows VPS. How much do you think that took? whatever you said, the answer is no! Let’s see:

• remote desktop to the VPS – 15 seconds
• locating the folder in question – another 10 – 15 seconds.
• trying the delete button, checking permissions 1 minute
• googling for something as trivial as “how to delete a directory with a space in its name” and finding the right solution: 15 minutes. (this is an extreme drawback… Windows problems, are often not well documented)

Add to that stopping the VPS from virtuozzo (vzctl stop VEID), mounting it on the VPS Node (vzctl mount VEID) and going to the mount point ( c:\vz\private\VEID\root\Inetpub\FtpUpload ) and then unmounting (vzctl umount VEID) and restarting the VPS (vzctl start VEID) nand you’ve got yourself a good 25 minutes spent on removing 1 folder:

C:\Inetpub\FtpUpload\ \ÿta18594-ÿ\ÿ-;; &20 @tagged .by; quit %f;;…-ÿ\ÿÿ-ÿÿ\ÿÿ–ÿ\ÿ-;% scanned by %d.-ÿ\ÿÿ-ÿ

My advice? stick to Linux. Why? because Linux is well documented, it has a great community behind, mature, and many many more qualities can go here.