A lot of good things have emerged out of the fierce competition between Microsoft and Linux in the field of web hosting services. This competition has helped the customers to get big benefits. Like their competition, the debate for making a choice between them has also become quite fierce owing to the range of benefits that are offered by both of them. How has Linux shared hosting been able to give the market leader in this field, Microsoft, a run for its money? It is due to some of its interesting features of Linux shared hosting which are discussed here.

* Price: All of the Microsoft technologies are of proprietary nature and if anyone wishes to use them, a certain amount of fee needs to be paid to Microsoft to use them. This raises the overall price of using Microsoft based products, including servers. This in turn raises the price of Windows based servers. Since Linux operating system and various underlying software tools are free, the cost of installation and maintenance of Linux based servers is much lower as compared to those based on Microsoft Windows.

* Ease of operation: Open source technologies such as PHP, MySQL etc can be used easily on Linux based servers. While Microsoft supports these technologies as well, it supports its own proprietary technologies such as ASP.net and MS-SQL over the open source technologies.

* Though Linux comes along with these advantages, its use can be tricky as well. This is because Linux administrators aren’t easy to find. Besides that, a higher level of expertise is required to handle Linux based systems. Thus, in case of a serious problem in the Linux based servers, it can be fixed with some difficulty. Both Linux based systems have some advantages and disadvantages and these are replacing Microsoft based servers pretty quickly.