Advantages of Windows Hosting

When it comes to selecting your web hosting, you generally have two options: Windows hosting and Linux hosting. Windows hosting has several advantages, and it’s good to know what they are before you decide which type of web hosting you want.

The first advantage is that uploading your website can be very, very easy if you use Microsoft Expression (the new name of Microsoft FrontPage). This is Microsoft’s web design program, and if you’re using a Windows server for your hosting, it most likely has FrontPage extensions. This means that you can simply open your website in Expression, make changes to it, and hit save. Once you do, the changes you’ve just made are saved right to your web host, meaning they’re immediately online. With Linux or Unix, you’d have to upload all of your images and webpage files separately using an FTP program.

Windows hosting also allows you to take advantage of everything the .Net framework has to offer. If you’ve used ASP in your website, you’ll be able to use all features of the script. While ASP will work on other servers, you may only be able to use basic functions, not everything. Windows hosting is also the only host that supports the Visual Basic programming language.

Windows hosting is also, well, Windows. That means if you use Windows on your home PC, you’ll already be familiar with how Windows servers work. This means you won’t have to learn an entire new system just to host your website.

Of course, if you’re using Visual Interdev to create applications or plan on building Windows-based applications for your website, of course you’ll want to use a Windows-based hosting system. You don’t want to try dealing with a different server operating system simply because some Windows applications would just be incompatible.

Finally, Windows servers can communicate with Microsoft Access databases much more easily than Unix based servers can simply because the two both use the same protocols. If you’re going to be using Access instead of MYSQL, then you’ll certainly want to use a Windows server.

While there are some disadvantages to using a Windows server for your hosting, there are many advantages. If you’re using Microsoft’s databases, programming tools, or applications, a Windows server will make things much easier for you.