Windows vs. Linux Hosting

Amongst techno-geeks, the battle between Linux and Windows is fierce. This may be surprising to the many people who have never heard of Linux. Linux is an "Open Source" operating system. This means that it is free in every sense of the word. Free is a pretty tough price for Microsoft to beat. However, since most shared web hosting plans are so cheap, the operating system doesn't actually add that much to the cost.

Both Operating Systems are very popular online. Linux tends to dominate the lower end of the market since its price is on target, and Microsoft's Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 does well since it is the development platform of many large corporations.

For radio websites, the choice between Operating Systems has a lot more to do with what language you are going to be using. If your website will be plain old HTML - then both handle that perfectly, so the choice is usually Linux for price reasons. However, if your website will do any server-side processing, then the language you choose for that task dictates your OS choice.

PHP vs. ASP.NET

This choice has been the source of much discussion between my business partner and Chief Programmer, Tony , and myself in our company. You can see that the result was a split decision - if you visit the guest section of our website http://welcome.preppermint.net - it is written in PHP. However if you become an affiliate or get a trial, you'll see the actual heart of our service is ASP.NET. And both were the correct choice for their respective purposes (at least in my mind).

PHP has a few strong things going for it. since PHP and everything required to run it is free, other Open Source projects tend to use it. So if you want to put a free, well-designed blog on your site - (http://wordpress.org )Wordpress is written in PHP. If you want a top notch Content Management System, so that non-techies can write articles for your site, contests will be automatically published and unpublished as their dates come up and ads will be tracked - then the most popular one is (http://joomla.org)Joomla - which is written in PHP. (The guest section of Preppermint - http://welcome.preppermint.net is a Joomla site - even though the URLs end in ".html" - thats a trick for another column.)

If you want good free forum software, PhpBB 3.0 is just about ready to be released and it uses PHP... you get the picture. PHP-based projects also tend to have much better communities. Its probably because they are open-source, so the users feel they have to contribute back to the community for using the software. Also, PHP developers are more likely to be working on their own then a corporate environment, so if they need assistance, they need to get it through the internet.

ASP.NET is Microsoft's answer to the popularity of free languages like PHP. ASP.NET is free, but it requires Windows, and its HTTP server (IIS) to run. .NET is very powerful and efficient at developing complex systems - but you kind of need to know what you're doing. There are not as many free programs with big communities that you can easily install and get running if you're a beginning web programmer. However, if you have a programming assassin at your side (Tony was in the 82nd Airborne when I met him) a little .NET can be a great thing. Without .NET, there is no way we could have gotten Preppermint off the ground as quickly and made it as easy to maintain. We recently passed 6 months with no downtime at all.