One of the fundamental decisions that a small business must make is
whether to host their business website on a Windows Server or on a Unix platform.
The right decision for your small business will depend on a number of things:
- Will your business website be a simple "brochure
type" website or will it be more sophisticated (e.g. dynamic page
generation from a database)?
- Do you plan to integrate your small business website
with "back office" applications or databases. If so, what
platforms do they use?
- Do you already use a web development package that
your staff are comfortable with? (e.g. Microsoft FrontPage, Microsoft
Expression)
- Does your technical staff have experience with a
particular database system (e.g Microsoft Access, SQL Server, MySQL,
Oracle)?
- Do you prefer "open source" solutions to
proprietary solutions?
In general, business web hosting on a Unix (or Linix) platform is more
common and less expensive than web hosting on the Microsoft platform.
Consequently, if price is a major factor, it is better to host your website
on a Unix or Linix server and take advantage of free or inexpensive
non-proprietary software such as MySQL and PHP.
If you are committed to using Microsoft products in your business (e.g.
MS Access, SQL Server, Office Applications) and plan to integrate your
business website with your back-office Microsoft databases or applications,
hosting your business website on a Microsoft server might be a better idea.
If you are planning to build a simple "brochure ware" type business
website, it really doesn't really matter which platform you use. If,
however, there is specific software application that you are require, it might only
run in one environment or the other.
Although some software applications
run in both Unix and Windows environments, all features might not be available in both
environment. For example, simple websites built using Microsoft's
FrontPage can run either on Windows or Unix servers but integrating an MS Access
database and using it to dynamically generate web pages is only
possibly on a Microsoft server.
