If you were to be asked, out of all the server operating systems on the market, which platform had the highest reliability (in terms of downtime), what would your guess be?

LAST YEAR, WE wrote about a controversial report penned by technology research and consulting outfit the Yankee Group, claiming that Windows was more reliable than Linux. The Yankee Group has been busy again this year, but its latest report seems to offer a very different story to last year’s, with Windows now performing significantly worse than its Linux and Unix rivals.

According to a recent IDC report highlighted by ZDNet, Linux is booming. At just 9.4 percent of the overall server market in terms of revenue in 2007, Linux has now climbed to 13.4 percent of the overall server market, with Unix at 7.7 percent and Windows at 36.5 percent.

According to Loura DiDio, Yankee analyst and author of the 2007 Global Server Hardware and Server OS Survey, 23 percent of survey respondents intend to migrate away from Exchange Server and adopt an alternative Linux or Open Source email and messaging distribution platform in the next 12 to 18 months.

"After servers that authenticate Windows XP and Vista go down for 19 hours, analysts question the reliability of Microsoft's services."

Global web server usage: The Apache server leads by some 55 percent share serving 112,663,533 web sites. Also the newer free software web servers nginx and lighttpd are in the top 5.

Best Linux Distro for Web Server: If you are planning to build a web hosting company or simply host your own website at home, then it is best to use Linux as your operating system. Linux servers have been known to be extremely reliable and rarely crashes so there's less downtime.

An online retailer has saved more than £56,000 in software licensing costs after moving its IT platform from Microsoft Windows to Linux.

Moving from Windows 2003 Server to a SuSE Linux Enterprise Server has also enabled the company to extend the life of the four-year-old servers that were unable to run newer versions of Windows.

Microsoft's Internet Information Services (IIS) Web servers are more than twice as likely to deliver malware to unsuspecting users than the open source Apache Web server, according to a recent security survey performed by Internet search giant Google. That's quite an allegation, coming as it does from one of Microsoft's chief competitors.

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