There’s no reason to host on Linux anymore

When I started in the hosting industry as a product manager with Mail.com, Microsoft wasn’t even a footnote in the hosting market.  Apache was the unquestioned leader.  I even remember an article during the hosting boom days in the late 90s or early 2000s that quoted Graham Weston of Rackspace saying that “God invented Linux for hosting”. 

When I started with the hosting team at Microsoft in 2004, we were just starting to make progress with building a viable hosting platform. Starting with Windows Server 2003 we added some features that were important to hosters, which brought significant gains in the Netcraft active sites market share numbers (in the neighborhood of 10 to 15 percent). Today’s launch of Windows Server 2008 shows that we have not only caught up but actually passed Linux in what we can offer hosters (e.g. hosting ASP.NET and PHP applications on the same server).

For many years, Linux dominated the market.  For Microsoft to have reached the point where we can truly match Apache and offer hosters a superior platform is truly exciting.