hello,
im sorta new to building web servers. i have a couple of domains and i would like to build my won web server...so i can host my websites from home...i want to start by asking what people would recomment using lynux or windows server 2003.....im gonna be running a classified php type sites and i guess i need to know everything there is to make it all work....starting from like just purchasing a depp poweredge or something.....every piece of advice is greatly appretiated
Thank You

Unless you want to get super crazy with performance down to the whatever smallest amount possible, PHP will run on both Windows and the Linux operating systems. Everyone has an opinion about which server environment is better. That being said, I would think that your decision would come down to which of those two choices you're going to be more comfortable administrating. Are you happier with the point-and-click or with typing instructions at a command prompt?

Bill

who said linux cannot be point-and-click?

http://howtoforge.com/perfect-server-ubuntu8.04-lts

Nobody said can't be. :-) If you'd like to use the GUI, most current distributions, including (K)Ubuntu, offer a grand assortment of of GUI administration tools ranging from user management to configuring daemon runtime configuration.

To cut down on disk and resource usage however, sometimes a server's administrator will choose to not install the GUI environment, instead choosing to edit config files and such manually from a command prompt.

Bill

It's all about what you're comfortable with!

Linux can be point-and-click, or you can do it all at command line. I'll also say that if you're running Linux as a web server (with php/mysql/whatever) with light to medium traffic, hardware specs aren't really an issue (I mention this since you were talking about purchasing a server). I have a colocated Linux server running ~70 domains on a Pentium 3 with 512 MB of RAM That includes web traffic (php/perl/mysql/etc) email, ftp, irc, and shell (for trusted users) services!

Windows offers the point and click interface, true, but the way IIS works isn't that intuitive to me. But if that's what you're familiar with, I'd say go for it. For the application that it sounds like you're talking about, though, I think Linux offers more "bang for the buck".

Hope this helps!
-G

Couldn't agree more. Thanks Gromit. :-)

How about performance???
As far as desktops go, Windows is top notch compared to all other OS's on the planet. But, when it comes to web-servers, does Linux or some Unix version leave Windows in its dust?

Windows Server is a lot more expensive. And its web edition sucks. Go for standard edition, but like I said, it costs a lot.

Most Linux servers leave Windows IIS in its dust. If you need to run Windows, try using Apache instead of IIS. Apache is free, fast and typically deals with the loads better than IIS would.

The server hardware will be much cheaper for a Linux environment because it uses less RAM, CPU etc to get the same results as a more expensive server running Windows. Linux was more or less developed for being servers whereas it seems like more of an afterthought for Microsoft.

Windows server 2008 is actually really really fast