Web server is the computer where your web site pages will be stored. Here the type of web server means mostly the operating system running in it. It can be windows or Linux or Unix system. This is the platform over which your other server software will be running. So this plays an important role in the web site requirements. You can plan your developer team, programmer and designers based on this. Mostly you will get two options in deciding the server software. One is a window and other is Linux. All most all hosting providers will offer you Linux hosting with few will offer window hosting. Power of Linux and its security is important features for which it is popular. The main reason is cost of developers in these platforms and the cost of hosting. Generally Linux hosting is cheaper than Windows hosting. Even though there are hybrid options are available but mainly there are two parallel offers available. We will discuss them in details here. We will discuss four requirements of each stream of systems.

LAMP: Here the operating system is Linux. Web server is Apache. Database is MySQL and scripting language is PHP

WIMA: Here the operating system is Windows 2003, web server is IIS (Internet Information Server), MSSQL is the database and Active Server Pages ( ASP ) or dot net is the scripting language.

However PHP, MySQL and Apache runs equally well in Windows platforms.

If you are not a tech guy then you need not worry about all these. If you are thinking of building highly content specific site with simple html pages then you need not worry about the server. Plain html pages works in both the servers. But if you have a script developed in ASP then you have to go for Windows server to host it. Same way ensure that PHP is installed in your server if you want to run your PHP script.

A common way of identifying the server while visiting a web site is by looking at the address bar. The file extension ends with .php then you can conclude that the page is written by using PHP script and most likely it is Linux operating system. If the extension is .asp then it is a window server. But these points are generally true but not always. The reason is PHP can run equally well in windows platforms and servers can be configured to run different scripts with any given extension. On this you can check the site www.netcraft.com to get more detail on the server running a web site.

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