Why is there such a discrepancy in pricing between Windows and Linux hosting services?

Question

I am a .Net developer for payment, but I have my personal website hosted on the LAMP stack with a hosting provider. I was looking for some time to switch to Windows with a .Net hosting provider, but what really disables me is the price. The reason I want to switch is because I find .Net much more enjoyable for development, and I use .Net rather than PHP much more in practice.

With my current Linux hosting provider, for $ 10 a month, I get more bandwidth and disk space than I could use on a personal site. Currently, I allocate 380 GB of space and 7700 GB of translation. Although I understand that I would never be able to get to these limits, especially given the limitations of CPU usage, it is nice that I will have a bunch of pictures on my website without worrying about running out of space.

However, with the offers that I see on Windows hosts, as an example, for $ 17 a month, I would only get 2 GB of disk space and 200 GB of transfer. The transfer limits seem to fit well with what I will be using for a month, but 2 GB of disk space seems extremely low. Moreover, only 400 MB can be used for SQL Server databases.

It’s enough that the question is the price difference associated exclusively with the cost of paying for licenses for Windows and SQL Server, or is there something else that I don’t consider to be included in the cost of hosting Windows plan. I get a great service with my Linux host, so I don’t think it’s a quality problem for the people who run the various hosting sites. Does the cost of software licensing really matter?

If the price is due to licensing costs, why don't you see more of the host with Windows and .Net, but with alternative databases such as PostgreSQL or MySQL to keep prices to a minimum, which provides basically the same features.

Answer 1

I think this is due to two main problems:
1) Licensing, it is obvious that the host will charge you more because he has to pay for windows and SQLServer.
2) Hardware, working windows require higher resources for fewer virtual hosts, and vps can be run on the same hardware level as the Linux server.

Answer 2

Since licenses for Windows Server and SQL Server cost a lot of money for a Core Core processor (and not just for a machine), so your hosting provider must recover the cost of a license.

This is above normal operating costs (this is the only thing Linux servers apply to).

I also feel your pain because I support the site for my female business, and although I have not finished with the fact that its end-user application written in ASP.NET, I first adhere to LAMP hosting is enough for now.

Answer 3

In addition to the cost of licenses, think about system administrators. You will probably need fewer system administrators to support a whole group of Linux servers than for windows. This cost is passed to you.

Answer 4

Cloud Cloud Mosso can switch between LAMP and .NET without changing the price. Migrating from MySQL to MS SQL is a price difference of $ 5 per month, but .NET can obviously work with MySQL if the price is a concern. I mention this product because your requirements (disk space and bandwidth) are technology independent.

Disclaimer: I am a Rackspace employee and Mosso is a Rackspace company.

Answer 5

This question is most likely more suitable for Internet service providers, rather than for programmers. This question could easily ignite the usual holy wars over Microsoft against OSS. My own observations are parallel to yours. Internet service providers prefer LAMP for Windows.

I worked with both stacks and IMHO, and looking at the big picture, it seems to me that Microsoft's technology and licensing were designed to target the Intranet development market. Thus, TCO does not look so favorable for Internet applications.

I'm not saying that you cannot write a really great Internet application using the .NET application stack. Of course you can. It’s just that LAMP is better positioned in terms of TCO for the types of workload faced by Internet service providers.

This is not criticism of Microsoft. They have shareholder interests to protect. The rate of return for the so-called enterprise development is higher than the type of customers who best serve Internet providers.

Answer 6

"because they can"

seriously, it was called the "Free Market". check this!

EDIT:

[sigh] it's a shame that many companion drivers have no sense of humor ... and no understanding of the economy. So let me explain:

one theory is "Linux is free, windows cost money." Although true, this does not explain the difference, since windows are a fixed cost.

what explains the difference is the free market. -

• It can be argued that the typical linux user is cheapskate and does not want to pay much for hosting services, because they know that the software used for hosting did not cost the host anything, while typical windows user sucker is willing to pay more for hosting services because they know that the software used for hosting costs the owner’s money.
• but in reality, since the cost of hardware, software, and, as a rule, even bandwidth is a fixed cost, there is simply not enough water above all - the relative fixed costs of the hosts are not related to the large-scale hosting of the company

so that the price becomes what the target market is willing to pay, balanced by how well the host presents his qualities and other “value added” offers.

For example, I used to host my site on a cheap LAMP host, because it was just static html. When the site switched to e-commerce, I researched the "free" e-commerce packages offered by an inexpensive host and found that they all had serious security flaws and therefore decided to use asp.net and write my own e-commerce code, because (a) I I know asp.net, (b) I needed to learn to do this anyway, and (c) I trust my code more than anyone else [or, at least if there is a flaw in my code, I have someone easily accessible to blame!].

The difference in hosting plans is a few dollars a month. The new host latency seems better, but some of their technical support is lame, and they lack some obvious features, but nothing that I can’t work (without paying anymore elsewhere), so in the end I’m happy pay a little more. The owner I chose is not the cheapest, and they are not the most expensive. And I spent about ten minutes researching, because for my site it was not so important.

which raises the following economic point: if the average programmer costs $ 50 per hour, how economical is using the programmer’s time to complain about hosting costs around $ 7 a month?

overall, the answer is: free market.

EDIT 2:

Below are the prices of licenses for a Windows server

They certainly look like a one-time fixed cost to me, but even if it's an annual fee, it still pales in comparison to the cost of hardware and hosting bandwidth.

The relationship between license costs and hosting costs is, at best, indirect and essentially irrelevant compared to market pressure.

But please, do not forget a word from the programmer, ask your hosting provider.

breakdown of costs for hosting services

Application:

MS-SQL licenses require extra $$$, so this may be a factor.

Answer 7

This is not really the answer to your question (other people did a good job of this), but have you thought about unloading your static resources, which probably occupy the bulk of your disk space, something like Amazon S3? Thus, only your application code and database will be stored on the Windows host.

Answer 8

Pretty much echoed what other people have said here. But the difference of $ 7 per month is really a big difference. I know that you have less disk space and bandwidth, but $ 7 is not very much to cover licensing costs.