14 DAY TRIAL // Uhm, now it's official: the Linux websites have better uptime and load faster than Windows-based websites. According to a study made by WatchMouse website monitoring company, the Linux and Windows websites hold an almost 75% share, of course with variations depending on regions.
The WatchMouse company started a research by which it aimed to decide which server platform is preferred by web developers. For many, results were not exactly surprising. The fact that Apache is better and more reliable than MS' IIS is has been preached by many programmers and even users. WatchMouse made the research that I've mentioned above on more than 1500 European websites from countries such as Germany, Poland or the UK. The company considered the operating system and the web server platform during their research, but also the country where the server is based, as this is another important factor affecting the uptime. The Polish and Deutsch professional websites proved to be based on the Linux-Apache combination, while those from the UK have a neat tendency of going along with Windows/IIS. But if you check the relative performance of the respective websites, you'll notice a significant difference, Linux outperforming Windows by far.
One in four of the monitored professional websites have an uptime of 99.9%, which suffices for customer satisfaction. Two thirds of the websites have an availability of less than 99.9% which accounts for at least 8 hours downtime per year.
Mark Pors, Chief Technology Officer with WatchMouse, stated over the results:
"Even though the companies in our study seem to prefer Windows over Linux, our research shows they would be better off using Linux/Apache based websites. Research has shown that most web users are very impatient and will wait no longer than four seconds for a webpage to load. Companies need to realize that website uptime is crucial for a healthy customer satisfaction and a solid client base. Organizations need to become more aware of the impact the choice of web server platform can have on their overall availability and performance."
A complete overview of the monitoring results, listing all the monitored sites, can be found on WatchMouse.com.