Nine Out of Ten Top Webhosting Sites Run Linux/BSD

in linux on 2014-05-14 05:59 (#3KK)

Here's some good news for everyone except Microsoft: nine out of ten of the most reliable hosting providers in April 2014 use Linux or FreeBSD as their hosting platform. Microsoft only got one of the ten slots, thanks to Netcetera, a provider specializing in WinServer 2012 hosting. Of the nine top sites, five use Linux and four use FreeBSD. The performance measurements are made at fifteen minute intervals from separate points around the internet, and averages are calculated over the immediately preceding 24 hour period. More detail on the measurement process and stats is available at Netcraft .

Any recommendations (Score: 1)

by rocks@pipedot.org on 2014-05-14 14:22 (#1KP)

I currently use https://www.linode.com/ (Linode) for webhosting, anybody have any recommendations over whether it is worth considering a switch to any of the top 10 given in the parent article?

Re: Any recommendations (Score: 1)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-05-14 16:18 (#1KW)

All of my sites are run from my FreeBSD VPN, so I have no idea. I used to run a site or two off of siteground. I'm not surprised they're not on the list: they are smaller, specializing in PHP template sites you could use to get a Joomla or Drupal or Wordpress site up and running in minimal time. But I get the idea they were over-subscribed, because I started having all sorts of trouble getting even simple pages to load. Finally dumped them for my VPN, so I've saved a lot of money annually and also have my own dedicated bandwidth. On the other hand, I get to administer my own Apache server, which is not easy and is slightly scary.

Re: Any recommendations (Score: 2, Informative)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-05-14 18:41 (#1M2)

VPS. You mean VPS. :)

I finally got myself a VPS at a cheap good provider last year, and I love it. So much more freedom than an ordinary web host. I kept hitting walls at Hostgator -- oh, can't use this package because it's not just a script and the webhost won't let me install software just for me, no way to try LibreOffice Online, can't get WebDav working, etc. -- and it mostly all goes away when you control your own virtual server. I highly recommend it. My VPS costs less than $8 a month. There are all kinds of great deals often published and discussed at lowendtalk.com / lowendbox.com . (THIS IS NOT SPAM. That's a discussion board and deal site.)

Re: Any recommendations (Score: 1)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-05-14 20:09 (#1M6)

Yes, you're right - VPS. Thanks for the correction! I've heard about lowendbox.com and the price is great. I pay a bit more than that - $12/month - but I'm happy with the hardware, the software, and the service, so no complaints. The one thing I've found VPSes aren't good for is offsite replication/storage. I've got many gigs of photos I'd like to backup with an rsync script, and while a Linux or BSD VPS would make that easy, most packages don't provide nearly enough space, thinking what you are probably going to build is a webserver or something.

Mine also runs a Usenet node (www.dictatorshandbook.net for the dictator.* newsgroups), but I don't use it for much else than that. It's just so cool how much you can do with a good OS on a dedicated box (OK, virtual, but from my point of view you'd never know it), and a fixed IP address.

"Top Ten" how? (Score: 1)

by fatphil@pipedot.org on 2014-05-14 20:37 (#1M8)

Looks like it's just a very short term effective downtime measurement. Day-to-day, 5-nines is easy; I do it for my company servers 99% of days.
If these providers have only two clients, then it doesn't matter how reliable they are, they are not "top ten" in anything significant.

MS fans could come up with another equally useless statistic that showed windows in 9 out of the "top ten", I'm sure.