Oh I just GOTTA! :)
Why, in the name of all that is holy, would ANYONE host a PHP and PERL based site on Windows?
You wouldn’t choose to, but not because of Windows. That said, both of them under Apache seem to be pretty decent, though PHP has some interesting issues, as usual.
It costs more, is more buggy and unstable, scales questionably, and generally costs more to maintain, in my experience.
My experience is exactly the opposite. For example, this server was up and running with 2 hours, from placing the order to getting the stuff on it. OK, there were some issues with Perl and PHP under IIS that just didn’t work and meant that Apache was used, BUT, its up and running, with mail services, DNS services, FTP (though disabled at present) and Web services. In under a day. It takes me that long to apply the latest sendmail security patches.
They can tout their groovy Windows data center edition all they want – but, a solid UNIX or equivalent is way better.
This is Windows 2003 Standard. Its a LOT faster than Windows 2000 and in general apart from software problems (which I’d also get on the Linux system it turns out) is every bit as good performance wise as Linux.
At the very least, if you want cheap INTEL hardward, a good Linux distrbution is almost as good. Windows is overloaded with useless junk with security holes.
Is almost as good? I don’t want almost as good. By the way, Linux also has plenty of holes, but if I want to patch them I get to apply RPM’s and/or tar.gz’s manually. Particularly if I should dare to be using a system that’s, shudder, older than a year… I speak from experience of trying to upgrade a RedHat 6.2 server with a critical sendmail vulnerability. The cracks were out there, Bugtraq had live exploits, and no vendor provided RPM. I tried to upgrade sendmail manually but it broke half of AtMail and all our virtual users. After a day of messing around I checked again and there was a RedHat RPM – but my OS being so ‘old’ was the last to be updated… You know, when there’s a vulnerability in Windows I just right click and tell it to install.
OK…rant mode off. It’s just I had enough slowness and weirdness under the old set up. Windows is just asking for more problems.
Interesting analysis considering the slowness and weirdness provided was under Linux… The old set up was Linux, RedHat 6.2 bleeding edge when it was released. And that there is the biggest problem. Today its bleeding edge, tomorrow its no longer Red Hat its Old Hat. To keep up with Linux I need a full time admin person (ie me), but once the Windows stuff is setup, apart from the odd reboot I don’t touch it.
Do me a favour and compare administering Sendmail to administering MailEnable for Windows sometime 🙂
Anyway, I don’t want a religious flamefest over the virtues of Linux V Windows, we’ve been there and our decisions aren’t based on any fanatacism, just how much hair we want left 🙂
Steve.