There is considerable controversy regarding suitable operating systems for webservers. The Internet, in its original form,
was designed to run under various OSes related to the Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD), which lives today in the
several flavors of Unix (FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris) and Linux (Debian, Suse, Redhat). These are, for
the most part,
Open Source software (although Redhat and Solaris are proprietary versions)
Some years ago, Microsoft, realizing that they could not make money from free software, decided to port their popular Windows operating
system to a multi-user environment, and call it a webserver. It does work, most of the time, although it tends to run slow. The biggest
problems are that
- there are severe restrictions on what 3rd party software you can use. Perl, PHP, and MySQL (all important web tools) are difficult
to install, and are buggy.
- most users are relegated to using as a database, either Access (slow and not suitable), or SQL Server (expensive)
- most servers are controlled from a GUI admin interface which is very
CPU intensive, and bogs down an already slow server.
Windows is a good desktop operating system. It is
not a good multi-user, multi-process webserver. Of the 10 largest websites in the
world, only one uses Windows. You can guess which one.
In its defense, there are valid reasons why a large corporation would use Windows for a webserver. If they have an Intranet, or internal
network, tied to desktop users, network printers, and a public website, there are technical issues related to interfacing all those
systems. It can be done, using Samba, but it requires administrators who really know their stuff. They may also have some
very expensive proprietary financial or accounting application written in C++ or Java, which further complicates the issue. Those
people are stuck with a bad, and very expensive, situation. Too bad.
You are better off, because you now know not to get caught in the Windows trap. At Apptech Services, we use FreeBSD
servers, one of the most stable operating systems on earth, although a migration to Linux may be in the plan for the near future.
