While selecting people get confused at very first step whether to choose Unix or Windows. Well, it depends upon your Web site applications and many more things.  For this you should compare this two platforms and then decide.

Windows have a server platform called Microsoft Windows Server , while UNIX is an Open source. The source code of Linux is available freely to any one. It is a free operating system while the Windows Server needs a licensed copy i.e. it needs purchase. UNIX is contributed by thousand of the users and hence it is updated frequently than Windows Server. In complexity UNIX server is more complex as it is an open source.

If you go for the Windows Web hosting , Windows server supports almost all Microsoft products which includes FrontPage, Visual Interdev, and Microsoft Access. It also supports ASP (Active Server Pages) which is very popular scripting languages and used widely for building dynamic websites, and data driven Webpages.

Most of the times User builds their web sites on their own, its always worth considering that the most CGI Programs which are available today online are developed on UNIX. This simple means that this applications performs best and suits UNIX at their best.

Security and reliability is one of the main concerns.  There are multiples views  in this, many of them go for windows being more secure, while some say that the UNIX is the best in security. UNIX is more faster and secure according to some users. People use windows widely and this gives people more time to exploit more flaws in this making this system more insecure. If we see UNIX platforms this OS is also hacked many times over the years.

If we consider the performance both the platforms perform well. At both the ends the developers work hard to gain better security , reliability and best features.

We have listed only few differences and similarities between these two servers i.e.  Windows server Hosting and UNIX.  You have take a look the type of application that your website is going to use. The cost related to the server operating system, the specific technology you are going to use runs better on UNIX or Windows Server.

As most of us must be aware, a Dedicated Server offer better security and reliability than any other web hosting solutions. Now-a-days dedicated servers too can be leased at affordable prices. Previously, only large businesses and enterprises used to host their websites on dedicated servers, but with the advancements in the web hosting industry, web hosts can offer servers at fairly cheap prices.

You have the option to opt between two types of servers namely Windows Dedicated Servers and Linux Dedicated Servers. Windows Servers being bit more expensive than Linux Dedicated Servers due to the licensing fees charged by Microsoft. Hence, if you are looking for cheap Dedicated server, a Linux dedicated server can be the best affordable option for you.

A Linux Dedicated Server can be considered to be more efficient and causes lesser technical problems as compared to other servers. The other benefit of Linux Dedicated Server is that it consumes lesser bandwidth than Windows Servers.

Linux Servers are considered to be more secure than Windows Server. For users who wish to have cheaper hosting solutions, there are many Linux hosting packages that can be opted for hosting the websites at cheaper prices. Linux hosting packages can be availed at cheaper prices due to the fact that Linux is an Open source OS and is registered under GNU, therefore there isn’t any cost of licensing that needs to be paid and hence decreases the cost of the hosting packages to be offered to the clients.

As there are advantages and benefits of having Linux Hosting solutions, there are some disadvantage and demerits too.  If your website requires LAMP technology, in that case Linux Dedicated Server would be the best option for you, but in case the website is designed using ASP.Net and requires MSSQL, then Windows Dedicated Server Hosting would be the best option to choose.

Before you choose a web hosting provider that offers Linux web hosting services, it is important that you get assured that they offer basic features such as firewall, virus protection and a control panel (optional)  along with flexible upgrade options. It is important that you check that the web host offers MYSQL database, sub-domain services, additional FTP creation etc.

There are few other basic features that you must keep in mind when choosing a perfect web host for you. You can refer the following link for the same : Key Aspects to Consider when Choosing a Web Hosting Provider.

You must bear in mind that, if you opt for a Linux Web Hosting server, you cannot avail the benefits of .Net and some of the other Microsoft applications.

SSL Explorer : SSL Explorer has two editions

SSL Explorer : Community Edition

SSL Explorer : Enterprise Edition.

Let us see the community edition.

SSL Community edition : It is an Open source SSL VPN product which is developed by 3Sp Ltd. This solution is licensed under GNU General Public License (GPL). Primarily this solution is aimed at the smaller business that requires remote access to the internal networks resources.

Its design is gives it an added advantage. It is designed to install upon a standalone server and it allows to interconnect remotely to an internal network resource such as intranet websites, file sharing, applications such as Fat Client and it also supports other data supports such as regular web browsers. The end user is benefited in the way of use and easy access to the resources they need daily. The resources needed daily can be accesses through the web browser without installing dedicated VPN Client software.

Number of operating systems supports this Explorer;

Microsoft Windows 200, XP, Xp,x64,2003 & Vista

Almost all the main flavors of Linux : Red Hat Enterprise linux, Fedora Core, CentOS,        SUSE Linux, Debian, Gentoo.

Mac OS X v10.4 or later.

Sun Microsystems Solaris 8 and 9.

SSL Explorer is written in java programming language and it contains databases of its own and the web server is used to serve the secure web pages which allows to access the back-end network resources. Shortly if we say it acts as a web based proxy which is an intermediate between external users and it also provides the means to authenticate the users by identifying by the querying a number of user database including Microsoft’s Active Directory.

A special care is taken  for the resources that use the port forwarding to operate successfully. For this type of resources a lightweight Java applet is developed known as SSL-explorer Agent which is downloaded and launched by the client browser.

SSL is beneficial to all the potential users, however there are group of many users which are greatly benefited and kept in mind while designing the browser.

Road warriors – The users who spend lot of time in traveling and need to connect to the office computer from number of different computers.

Technical support staff: In most of the corporations technical support is located at OFF site.

University Students: These students are also roaming and need to connect from the different locations.

Telecommuters: Exclusively these people work from the home and need the dedicated remote facility.

Technologies that is used by the SSL-Explorer:

rPath Linux – provides appliance platform for SSL Explorer virtualized appliance.]

Apache Struts – MVC framework for web development

Jetty 5.0 – Java based web server and servlet container.

HSQLDB-Lightweight java database for storing configures data and internal database.

AJAX Tags- For responsive web interface.

Common tags- used for Virtual file system implementation.

Log4j-Logging component of SL

Rome-RSS feed readers.

JCIFS-  For SMB protocol support for windows networking.

BEA systems jRockit- High performance SSL- Explorer installations.

GD library is an open source code library for the creation of images dynamically by the programmers. It can create many types of images which includes formats like PNG, JPEG, GIF and WBMP. In general GD is used to create charts, thumbnails, graphics and many more.

GD is designed in ANSI C programming language, however it can interface with many other programming language. This software is a developed by Thomas Boutell .It originally was designed for GIF draws, however since the revoking of Unisys license it stood for “Graphics draw “in general.

It is a very easy to use software and can be used for variety of graphics functions such as lines, arcs, text (using selected fonts), creating the images with other images and multiple colors. The latest versions support for truecolor images, alpha channels, and resampling as well and it also support various other features.

As stated earlier it is created in ANSI C language and it supports languages such as C, PHP, Perl, Python, OCml, Tcl, Pascal, GNU Octave, REXX, and Ruby.  It has an added tool “Fly” command line interpreter which allows image creation using GD. This helps in writing  scripts in any language and run it using Fly

Mostly GD is used with PHP, and it has moved to libgd.org.

Websites being completely flooded by images there exist a need for such a support.

ImageMagick is a software suite which allows a user to create edit and compose the bitmap images. It also allows to convert images to various other formats(more than 100) which includes DPX, EXR, GIF, JPEG, JPEG-2000, PDF, PhotoCD, PNG, Postscript, SVG, and TIFF. You can write, read,translate, flip, mirror, rotate, scale, shear, color formatting, special effects etc.

You can utilize the functionality of the ImageMagick from command line as it does not have GUI based interface to edit images. You can use it through code written in your hands on language.

You all would be happy to hear that this software is totally free with all its features and it is also Open source.It is ready to run binary distribution. It is licensed under GPL, ImageMagick License and BSD-Style license. It also supports all widely used Operating System.

This software is used by number of other programs to create image thumbnails such as MediaWiki, phpBB, vBulletin.

ImageMagick use a fully integrated API called PerlMagick..

Should we see some of its features.

File Format Conversion: It converts image from one format to other.

Transform: Resizes the images, rotates it, crop, flip or trim an image.

Draw: It adds shapes to the image and text also.

Decorate: It adds border or frame  to the image

Special effects: It adds special effects such as blur, sharpen, threshold, or tint an image.

Animation: It helps to create a sequence from a group of images, animate a image.

Text and comment: It helps to add a descriptive or artistic text in an image.

Image identification: It describes the format and properties of an image.

Composite: It allows to overlap one image over another.

Montage: Image thumbnails on an image canvas.

Motion Picture support: It reads and writes the common image formats used in digital film works.

Image calculator: user can apply a mathematical expression to an image.

DFT: It Discrete Fourier Transform which is implemented in forward and reverse.

High range dynamic Images: It accurately represent the variety of real scenes ranging from the brightest to the deepest.

Virtual pixel support: It allows a good access to pixel outside the image region

Many more…

Perl is a programming language mainly used for high level, general purpose, interpreted and dynamic programming.

Perl has some great features which we can say that it has borrowed from other programming language i.e. C, Shell Scripting, AWK, and sed. This language is very good in text processing, easy manipulation of text files, graphics programming, system administration, network programming, application that require database access and CGI.

Some of its features

The structure of Perl is broadly derived from C, as C it is procedural in nature.

It also takes some of the features from shell scripting programming. Many bukitin functions in Perl is same as that in Shell.

Perl takes lists from Lisp, arrays from AWK, regular expression from sed.

It is a interpreted language

Object Oriented

Cross platform

Forgiving nature

Very good in text manipulations.

Extensible set of libraries.

Very popular for web development

And mostly used in bioinformatics.

Advantages of using this language:

Portability: This code is not dependent on any operating system nor any platform.

String processing and regular expression support: mainly as this language is used for web development text processing is mainly used. Regular expression is support is most versatile feature and integrated into this language

CPAN: It is comprehensive Perl Archive Network which contains a good collection of reusable Perl code for many purposes.

Perl is free software which is licensed under Artistic License and GPL. The distributations are available for most Operating systems.It can be compiled from source code on all UNIX platforms

Disadvantages of perl.

It is difficult to create a binary image (exe) from a perl file.

If you use the code (Script) from the CPAN and you want it to run on different computer then, you need to install all the modules on that computer, which can be drag.

After the great success of the Google chrome browser, Google is now spreading wings to the master software i.e Operating system named after the browser itself as Google chrome OS. Stats show that over 30 million people use Chrome browser every day. The concept behind developing such kind of operating system is that, OS were designed when Internet(Web) was not there. So this operating system would be thinking in the context of web.

Some of the features disclosed yet.

Google chrome OS is an Open source operating system that will be initially targeted towards Net books. It is lightweight too. In the second half of the 2010 the operating system will be available with its code with net books.

Speed, security and simplicity will be the key aspects of the operating system. Now the operating itself will be a fast software as well as lightweight. This will help in few seconds boot up and get you on the web.

Users would love the OS when they hear that the operating system has a great security architecture will itself deal with the malwares, Viruses and security updates.

Google OS will run on ARM chips and x86 as well. The software of the OS is also simple. All web based application will automatically work and the new applications can be written using any liked technologies. This application would infact work on all the operating system such as Windows, Mac and Linux.

Google is also looking to develop a cloud computing with web based Chrome OS, which will eliminate the need for local data and local software.

Google has thought of all the problems of the end users as well. Many problems arise while using OS in day to day life such as, users need to get email instantly without waiting for the System to boot up and browsers to start up.

All of them just hope that the system should be as fast as it was new, data backup is also a  worry of the users. What harasses the users is configuring the computer to work with every software, script or utility, this takes a lots of time and hardly succeed. This operating system will make the people happy who like to spend more time on internet

Some people are yet confused and aren’t sure about the Operating System (OS) to be installed on their servers. Let me clear that doubt, one can have any OS on a server, irrespective of the one they have on their local computing machine. It makes no difference if one has Windows on the local machine and wishes to have Linux OS on the server.

As we all are aware, Windows and Linux are two different operating systems. Windows is widely used on the household/office PC’s. Linux is a newer version of Unix OS. Both contribute to an excellent web hosting environment. Though, we cannot deny the Pro’s and Con’s of each.

An individual usually gets stuck when choosing the OS on the servers. Here are certain factors that may help you to get rid of this confusion.

COST:

Cost is one of the major determining factors when choosing an OS.

Linux is an Open Source OS, which means one does not need to pay the licensing fees inorder to have it. Hence, Linux is comparatively cheaper than Windows. Whereas, one needs to purchase the license of Windows inorder to install it on the machine. A single licensed copy can be installed on one computer. But, with Linux, once you own it, you can freely install it on any number of machines.

RELIABILITY:

Linux is reputed for its stability and reliability. Meaning, Linux server is much less likely to crash than Windows Server. Hence, these servers can offer more uptime to the web-sites hosted on it.

SPEED:

There is practically not much difference in the speed of both the OS, but there is marginally faster speed seen in Linux when processing basic web pages.

SCRIPTS:

Many CGI programs can be found over the Internet. Majority of the Perl scripts, developed on Unix/Linux servers.Most of them can be freely downloaded from the internet.

FUNCTIONALITY:

Microsoft’s Active Server Pages (ASP) programming/scripting language are supported by Windows only. It enables oneself to build dynamic web-pages by connecting to Microsoft’s database such as SQL server or Access. Linux, does not offer any support to ASP and Microsoft databases, instead MySQL database is supported.

Today, more and more people are switching to Linux Web Hosting solutions as it is easy to use, more stable, open source, free updates are available and most importantly it is cheap. Hence, unless ASP and MsSQL database is required by a web site, Linux can prove to be a better choice over Windows.