Webmaster 101

Part-1: Overview

Windows or Open Source, the mention of those four words is enough to start an argument in any technical forum. Geeks can argue from either side for hours and days and there can never be a proper conclusion to any argument on whether Windows is better than Linux or the other way round.

One way to end the discussion is to see it from an individual’s point of view. For an average home or office user Windows will score 9 on a scale of 10 while most user friendly Linux Distros will only score 7.5 at the most on the same scale of 10, the factors taken into account being usability, applications available and problem solving.

While Windows is developed by a profit oriented organization and therefore the OS itself is professionally built and takes care of the requirements of first time users as well as expert users. On the other hand Linux Distros are usually prepared by developers and coders in their free time by contributing to a community. If a user faces a problem while working in Linux unless and until he can find proper help he is more or less stuck. However, from a webmaster’s point of view Linux is far more customizable than Windows.

Windows requires a person to undergo proper education and training while in Linux anyone can get started as there is a lot of material available to guide and help. Forums and communities out there are full of users looking to help out each other and solve each others’ problems. Webmasters in Linux environment can easily get help on their project whereas in windows getting free assistance might to be as easy. The best part is, in Linux a webmaster can find an open source script and customize it to his liking to suit his project, he needn’t start from scratch. This saves lots of man hours and also costs a lot less for buyers, therefore buyers prefer open source custom scripts to custom windows scripts. Which means more work is available, enough for everyone to find one.

Filed under: Windows & IIS, Unix & Apache