It's more and more common that a person owns a web site, which can be for blog, family web site, small business web site or even a forum. And the majority of those small-size or medium-size web sites are hosted in Linux environment. Why so many webmasters would like to make this decision?

I think below are 3 key reasons for it.

1) Stable

As an open source operating system, code of Linux is open to the public so that anyone can read it and suggest improvements or point out bugs. Over the years, Linux has been developed in various flavors (the most famous one is Red Hat). Thousands and thousands of people have contributed their time and effort to making Linux web hosting run faster and to provide simpler, more efficient and bug free code. With an open programming environment, improvements are made on a continual basis and problems are seen relatively quickly and solved with a minimum of difficulty.

And the same reason as why it's stable, the security level of Linux is also higher than Windows.

2) Cheap

Linux is free to all. Unlike Windows, you have to pay thousands of dollars for a license. And this is also part of reason why the list price of Linux web hosting package is much lower than that of windows web hosting packages.

3) A lot of Free Scripts to Help Setting up the Web Site

Open source world is just as beautiful as it could be. A lot of people contribute to it from different perspectives, such as OS, software development tools or applications. Linux, php, and MySQL have been a very popular platform to build an application. Right now, you can find many very good open source application to set up a forum, blog, image galleries, etc. And all those are free and easy to be installed. Even php and My SQL can work on Windows, Linux just a perfect platform for them.

There are more reasons that the webmasters want to choose Linux to host their web site. But a general guideline is that only if you want to use asp.net or sql server to build your web site, otherwise, Linux is always your best choice.