Did you know that the Internet was originally created by the US Department of Defense? It was intended as an emergency high speed communications platform for national emergencies. I doubt that anyone at the Pentagon could have imagined how rapidly Internet use would grow in popularity, or how fundamentally it would change modern life. Internet use, which was a novelty reserved for IT geeks in the early nineties, is now considered a necessity for many people all over the world.
The explosive expansion of the Internet has been a major boon to the economy over the past two decades, spurring the development of cottage industries based on hardware, software, and services. One of the biggest areas of growth has been in web hosting. When you consider that every single website is made up of data that must be stored on a server, it's easy to see why web hosting providers are now part of a multi billion dollar industry. The huge demand for these services and the free market competition that results has lead to very low prices and no shortage of choices for the hosting consumer. One of the top choices of smart webmasters is a hosting server with Linux.
Nearly all hosting companies guarantee a certain percentage of uptime. If you're new to web hosting, this means that the hosting provider promises that their customers' websites will be live and accessible a certain percent of the time, usually upwards of 99%. (No one can guarantee 100% uptime, since no technology is perfect and all servers must be taken offline for maintenance periodically.) When the hosting provider calculates the uptime, they factor in hardware, software, and external concerns. Thus the operating system running on the servers is of particular importance. Over the years, Linux based web servers have proven to be reliable, flexible, and powerful.
Linux was created by an interesting Fin by the name of Linus Torvalds. It is the first example of an open source operating system. The "source" in open source refers to the source code of the software. Open source means that that code is not hidden or encrypted, but rather available to the public for free. The effect is that any software developer can examine, improve, change, and re-release Linux. Once developers caught on to this new model of software development, they began working on Linux in earnest. The end result is similar to having a team of thousands of software engineers working around the clock to improve the operating system. Thus, the versions of Linux in use now are incredibly stable and reliable. Any bugs or glitches are caught and addressed with lightning speed. In addition, the open development of Linux allows it to rapidly respond to changing requirements, which makes it perfectly suited to the constantly evolving world of the Internet.
Linux based hosting servers host more websites worldwide than any other server operating system. We examined some of the reasons for this above. In addition to the stability and flexibility of Linux, there are technical concerns that cause many webmasters to choose it over Windows or FreeBSD. One of the most prominent is that Linux hosting servers often come with the LAMP software stack. LAMP stands for Linux (OS), Apache (web server software), MySQL (database management), and PHP/Perl/Python (interactive functionality). This combination of software allows webmasters to do almost anything they can conceive of. It's the basis of millions of web servers all over the world. So regardless of what type of website you plan to create, a hosting server with Linux will provide the solid foundation on which to build. Check out our available Linux plans, they're totally customizable, so there's one that's perfect for you.