Shoutbox

Hey everyone,

I don't often post in this part of the forum but as there has been several threads about Microsoft lately, I thought I could talk about my own server.

This is about Linux vs Windows as far as servers are concerned. Since I'm using computers for server applications, I've been told that Unix/Linux was far better than Windows for this kind of stuff, and until now, I had to take it as a fact as I didn't had the expertise to talk about the subject. Well, times have changed. My server (patchou.com) receives hundreds of thousands of hits every day (yeah, day, where do you think the auto-update requests of Messenger Plus! go? ) and it is currently using Windows Server 2003. So we're talking about real business here, no speculations, just the facts:

I ran Linux on my server for more than a year. I spent a lot of time understanding how things were working in Linux, I found it pretty interesting but the fact remains that I couldn't spend 1 month without a major problem (email server not responding, web server crashing, very slow server, disk full because of 50GB of unmanaged logs, ...). When the server worked, it worked fine, but it has been hacked several times (the last one was fatal, as some of you already know).  Every month where I didn't spend a whole day installing obscure-and-possibily-fatal patches I was told that my server was extremely out of date, opened to the whole world to hack, etc... I never had piece of mind with this system.

Now, I run Windows Server 2003. Three month ago, I spent 1 day configuring it, and... THAT'S IT. I have not touched the configuration even once since then, the server has never been rebooted, updates are downloaded and installed automatically, the mail server is solid as a rock, and don'y have to monitor any part of the server to be sure that all continues to run as smoothly.

That's all I wanted to say . If you plan to reply with reasons why Linux is so better than Windows, you'd better think twice about your arguments. I don't say that there aren't any, just that the facts speak for themselves.

Patchou