Broadband

An operating system functions largely out of sight, or at least is supposed to. It doesn’t matter to non-geeks how a file gets stored, or how memory is used, or how simultaneous processes share the limited resources available on a computer. These are among the basic functions of any operating system.

Yet, you can find very passionate supporters - who offer very detailed lists of pros and cons - for every operating system. Why? Because, though the low-level functions of an operating system do their work out of sight, there are many other features that rise to visibility. Sometimes, they do so when they’re not supposed to.

Weighing the pros and cons objectively could consume a book. But to select a web hosting operating system, a manageable level of considerations apply. They can be weighed even by those who don’t know a processor queue from a pool cue.

For most web site owners, administering the site/server is just overhead. It’s not something they take pleasure in doing and they have plenty of other things to worry about. Many wouldn’t know how and have no interest in learning (rightly so, given their priorities). Consequently, ease of administration is paramount for such people.

Whether a Unix-based site (usually Linux these days) is easier to administer than Windows depends on your current skill set and the type of tools and level of access the web hosting company provides. But in general Linux is more difficult to install and maintain than Windows and the learning curve is steeper.

A very important part of any web hosting company is reliability. A lot of power is worthless if it’s cut often. Outages are a normal part of business. Even Google and Microsoft go down from time to time. The difference is, it happens rarely and they have contingency plans in place to deal with it if the need arises. That means, if their site/system does go down it’s either up again in a flash, or you never see the outage because a backup system kicks in automatically and seamlessly.

Be sure to grill the company closely about their up time. They’ll often tout 99.6%, or some such figure. But, like the on-time figures of the airlines, those numbers can be shaded by adjusting the definition of ‘up time’. What matters to you is whether your visitors will be able to reach your site at any time of the day or night they might want to.

Find out what systems, both technical and human, they have in place to deal with failures of all sorts. Servers can go down, networks can fail, and hard disks can become defective and lose data even when the other components continue to work fine. The result is YOUR site is unavailable, which is all that matters to you. The web hosting company should be able to deal with all of that and have you up again very quickly.