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Windows VPS vs. Linux VPS

Max Ostryzhko Max Ostryzhko
Hosting Expert
Updated on

VPS hosting plans can be installed with a choice of Windows or Linux operating system to create a custom web server stack environment for software development and operations support of websites or mobile applications in production. Most web hosting companies use OpenStack or CloudStack with KVM virtualization, Citrix Xen Server, Parallels, OpenVZ or Virtuozzo to orchestrate their VPS platforms.

Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware ESXi are both more popular in private cloud construction for corporate IT data centers. Cloud hosting solutions such as Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, etc. provide Windows and Linux VPS plans at enterprise scale to major corporations, while retail web hosting companies offer high performance, budget rate, or managed platform VPS plans to small businesses and independent publishers to provide shared access to data center services.

OPERATING SYSTEMS

Windows Server 2016, 2012,& 2008 (IIS); Azure (Windows Nano Server); Windows Datacenter
VS
CentOS, CloudLinux, Debian, SUSE, Ubuntu, Red Hat, CoreOS, Slackware, RancherOS, ArchLinux

VIRTUALIZATION PLATFORMS

Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware ESX, & Parallels
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KVM, Xen, OpenVZ/Virtuozzo, SolusVM

PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES

ASP.NET, Visual Basic, C/C++/C#, Java, Lisp, Cobra, Clojure, Pascal, COBOL, Power Shell, Phalanger, Oxygene, IronPython, Eiffel, Nemerle, Fantom
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PHP, Python, Ruby, Perl, Ruby on Rails, Erlang, Go, JavaScript, Node.js, Haskell, Scheme, Polyglot, Scala, CoffeeScript, Pike, Groovy, Racket, Tcl/Tk

DATABASE FRAMEWORKS

MS SQL, Azure SQL, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2, Oracle Enterprise, SAP Sybase, Microsoft SQL Server Express, Azure Cloud SQL Server, MS Access
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MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, SQLite, Hadoop, Spark, HBase, Cassandra, Hive, Redis, CouchDB, Lucene, MongoDB, Giraf, Aurora, BigTable, Qbase

CLOUD PLATFORMS

Microsoft Azure, AWS, IBM Bluemix, Oracle Cloud, VMware vCloud Air & Horizon, Akamai, GCP/GCE, Equinix, Cisco Cloud, GoDaddy/MT, RackSpace
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OpenStack, CloudStack, Mesosphere, OpenShift, CoreOS Tectonic, Platform9, Google Cloud, AWS, RancherOS, Heroku, Cloud Foundry, DigitalOcean

PROS & CONS

Windows Server (IIS) is industry standard in enterprise; trusted for innovation, reliability, & data security; and used as a basis for ASP.NET, C++, Java, & Visual Basic software development. Azure is Microsoft's new cloud hosting platform.
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Linux web servers have multiple distribution choices for the operating system; can be installed with either Apache or Nginx for the web server; and will support many different MySQL/NoSQL databases & web programming languages.

CONTROL PANEL

Plesk is used as an alternative to cPanel to manage shared Windows Servers or the Azure AMP tool set
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cPanel runs on CentOS, CloudLinux, or RHEL; other open source alternatives are Virtualmin & Webmin
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