Linux hosting has become more and more popular in the past few years. Worldwide, well over 60% of internet servers currently use the Linux operating system and, starting from its very humble beginnings in MIT’s “mass collaboration and free software” undertaking of the mid 1980s, Linux has expanded to become the world’s predominant hosting option.

The Linux operating system is actually an open source software collaboration project. Under the terms and conditions of the Linux GNU General Public License, all the source code that makes this operating system function can be openly modified by absolutely anybody.

The “open source” approach to code improvement has permitted software writers from around the globe to make contributions to the improvement and evolution of this one of a kind operating system. This approach contrasts dramatically with companies like Microsoft, who continue to guard jealously the secrets of all their core systems and software products. Many experts believed the open source strategy to software creation would unavoidably result in horribly bloated software which was full of errors and inconsistencies. Actually, the opposite has turned out to be true and Linux has proven to be a very stable and well-designed operating system.

Web hosting businesses quickly realized that providing Linux hosting could supply them with a number of clear benefits. It’s an inexpensive operating system to own and replace. It’s extremely easy to set up, work with and maintain. It is robust, stable, dependable and secure. And, most importantly, when the virtually inevitable variety of alterations and customizations are required, the open character of the Linux project has guaranteed that a really wide range of knowledgeable people and organizations are freely available.

A lot of the advantages that Linux offers hosting providers are also important for webmasters and web developers. Exceptional reliability means that hosting providers running Linux-based systems will usually have outstanding (in other words, really low) down time figures, and these hosting systems tend to be very resistant to virus attack. The latter is largely because virus writers still have a tendency to focus on Windows operating systems, and this of course may change in the future. Nonetheless, at the moment, hosting security is nevertheless a major advantage for Linux-based systems.

Nonetheless, perhaps the most important weapon in the Linux armory is the flexibility this system offers web developers to exploit other, extremely popular, open source products like MySQL, XML, Python and PHP. All these applications have grown in popularity along with Linux. The control and integration options built into Linux have made it the logical option for both hosts and developers wanting to take advantage of these potent open source products.

As a final point, virtually all Linux hosting systems now include the hugely popular cPanel control panel. It’s possibly this user-friendly interface, more than any other, that has proved to be the Linux killer application.

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