For as long as we have had anything that resembles an internet — back to the 60’s even, server technology has been an ever changing environment of connected computers, operating systems and hardware to run at the best possible speeds. The target with any server is to run at peak performance and remain stable for weeks, months, years even without needing to reboot. Pretty ideal, eh?

In my experience having worked with many different systems over the years, still to this day I am always impressed with the recourse management, stability and overall performance of the Linux systems however this is not a favorite of mine for other purposes. I have worked with Microsoft Windows, OSX , Unix and Linux over the years and overall in the area of not needing to reboot to keep functioning, both Unix and Linux takes the prize.

For a website to be effective, it can only be as good as the system it is running on. If a security patch is pushed through and it forces the entire system to reboot, or in order to maintain stability the system has to reboot at the end of the day, every day, that means your website is only functional and accessible at certain times.

In essence, if a website is a business front to many, your website being down for any length of time is the equivalent of a store being closed when someone walks up to the front door and finds it locked and no one inside.

A server needs to be reliable and dependable. I taught myself how to work in the Unix and Linux environments. The organization that I was working for needed an in-house web server that would not crash and would remain up for long periods of time without ANY issue. We went initially with an off the shelf solution, an Apple X-Serve. The web technology was pre-built in, and frankly it was terrible. It lacked a lot of basics and expectations that even Microsoft bundled with their servers. The server was expensive and after spending that money, we had to make it work.

This was before Amazon.com existed. I had to get the books about Unix (the Apple OS is built on Unix) and I removed the pre-installed junk, and rewrote and reconfigured the software to make it work the way it should have been done to start with. This was not an easy task, but the end result was that it ran amazing and it seldom had issues.

Fast forward to today: Linux has many of the same pre-built options for web server technology, but pre-configured for security, stability, and functionality right from the start.

We recommend using hosting your website on Linux hosting with cPanel (for the web management) and have found it to always be reliable and stable. Any issues we have ever encountered were often from outside issues and not the server technology itself. We can build you a custom hosted environment in ANY web technology – Microsoft, Linux and others – on a Standard Web Host – or in Amazon AWS in the Cloud… we have the experience and the knowledge to provide any solution, but of course we still have our favorites.

For small to medium website hosting we highly recommend our partner Sneaker Web Design – I know their server administrator (Me).