Aplus.net Blog

Today we continue our six-part primer on deciding which operating system is best for your dedicated hosting needs.

Windows is the operating system (OS) created and used by Microsoft® and its family of products. As opposed to Linux®, which is based on an open-source application, Windows is closed-source. That means only the company and its associates can alter or improve it.

Windows 2008 is the latest (and most expensive) Windows OS. Released in February 2008, Windows 2008 is the follow-up to Windows 2003. Although both systems are still available for dedicated hosting, Windows 2008 is the superior system because of key improvements made over the course of five years of high-end development that revolved around intensive testing and market feedback.

However, this superiority comes at a price. The Windows 2008 OS for dedicated hosting typically runs around $25 per month higher than 2003. Among the online businesses and developers who have used it, though, the consensus is that the benefits more than pay for themselves in the long run. Improvements to patching, disk management, file storage, protocol, and active directory save time and money. There’s also the new Virtualization feature, which lets you increase hardware utilization by consolidating servers.

On the online business end, advanced, time- and money-saving document management and team collaboration tools have also been put into place. For developers, 2008 provides a greatly improved ability to build web applications, greatly simplifies troubleshooting on a global scale, and provides improved transactional registry and management.

Tomorrow, we’ll explore how Windows’ features give it an advantage in the marketplace, and what that means to your online business management needs.