Why such a disparity in pricing between Windows and Linux hosting services

Question

I'm a .Net developer for pay, but I have my personal web site hosted on a LAMP stack with a shared hosting provider. I've been looking for a while to switching to a Windows with .Net hosting provider, but what really turns me off is the price. The reason that I want to switch is that I find .Net much more enjoyable to develop on, and I'm much more in practice with using .Net as opposed to PHP.

With my current Linux hosting provider, for a measly $10 a month, I get more bandwidth and disk space than I could ever want to use on a personal site. I'm currently allocated 380 GB of space, and 7700 GB of transfer. While I realize that I could never possibly get to those limits, especially with the CPU usage limits put in place, it's nice to be about to have a bunch of pictures up on my website without worrying about running out of space.

However, with the offerings I see from the 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 well within what I would use in a month, but the 2 GB of disk space seems extremely low. Especially since only 400 MB could be used for SQL Server databases.

So enough background, on to the question, is the difference in pricing tied solely to the costs paying for licenses for Windows and SQL Server, or is there something else that I'm not considering coming into the cost of the Windows hosting plan. I get great service with my Linux host, so I don't think it's a problem of quality people that run the various hosting sites. Does the cost of the software licensing really make that much of a difference?

If the pricing is due to licensing costs, why don't you see more host with Windows and .Net, but with alternative databases such as PostgreSQL or MySQL available to keep the pricing to a minimum, which providing basically the same functionality.

Answer 1

Because Windows Server and SQL Server licenses cost a lot of money, per CPU Core (and not just per machine), and so your hosting provider needs to recuperate costs for the license.

This is on top of the usual operating overhead (which is the only thing Linux servers cover).

I also feel your pain, because I maintain a site for my wife's business, and while I'm not done with her front end customer facing application being written in ASP.NET, I have to stick to LAMP hosting first, which suffices at the moment.

Answer 2

I think this has to do with 2 major issues:
1) Licensing, this is an obvious one, the host will charge you more cause he has to pay for windows and SQLServer.
2) Hardware, running windows requires higher resources there for fewer virtual hosts, and vps can be run on the same amount of hardware as a linux server.

Answer 3

This question is most probably more appropriate for ISP vendors instead of programmers. This question could easily flare up the usual holy wars over Microsoft vs OSS. My own observation parallels with yours. ISPs prefer LAMP over Windows.

I have worked with both stacks and, IMHO, and looking at the big picture, it appears to me that Microsoft technology and licensing was designed to target the Intranet development market. So, the TCO doesn't look so favorable for Internet applications.

I'm not saying that you can't write a really great Internet application using the .NET application stack. Of course you can. It's just that LAMP is better positioned, from a TCO perspective, for the kinds of workload that ISPs encounter.

This is not a criticism of Microsoft. They have shareholders' interests to protect. The profit margins for so-called enterprise development are higher than the type of clients that ISPs best serve.

Answer 4

"because they can"

seriously, it's called the "Free Market". check it out!

EDIT:

[sigh] it's a shame that so many drive-by downvoters have no sense of humor...and no grasp of economics. So let me explain:

one theory is "linux is free, windows costs money." While true, that doesn't explain the difference, since windows is a fixed cost.

what does explain the difference is the free market. -

• One could argue that the typical linux user is a cheapskate is unwilling to pay much for hosting services because they know the software being used for hosting didn't cost the host anything, while the typical windows user is a sucker is willing to pay more for hosting services because they know the software being used for hosting costs the host money.
• but in reality, since the cost of the hardware, software, and typically even the bandwidth capacity is a fixed cost, the above just doesn't hold water - the relative fixed costs of the hosts is irrelevant for larger-scale hosting companies

so the price becomes whatever the target market is willing to pay, balanced by how good the host is at presenting their quality and other 'added value' propositions.

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

The difference is hosting plans was a few dollars a month. The new host's uptime seems to be better, but some of their tech support is lame and they are missing some obvious features but nothing i can't work around (without paying more somewhere else) so in the end i'm happy to pay a bit more. The host i chose is not the cheapest, and they're not the most expensive. And i spent about ten minutes doing the research because for my site it just wasn't that important.

which brings up the next economic point: if the average programmer costs $50/hour, how cost-effective is it to use said programmer's time to complain about $7/month in hosting fees?

in summary, the answer is: the free market.

EDIT 2:

Here are some windows server license prices

These certainly look like one-time fixed costs to me, but even if this was a yearly fee it still pales in comparison to the cost of the hardware and bandwidth for a hosting service.

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

But please don't take any programmer's word for it, ask a hosting provider.

cost breakdown for hosting services

Addendum:

MS-SQL licenses do cost additional $$$ so that may be a factor

Answer 5

Pretty much echoing what other people have said here. But is $7 difference a month really that big a difference. I know you get less disk space and bandwidth but $7 isn't really a lot to cover the costs of licensing.

Answer 6

Aside from the cost of licences, think about the sysadmins. You probably need less sysadmins to maintain a whole bunch of linux servers than you do for windows. That cost is passed on to you.

Answer 7

The Mosso Cloud Sites product can switch between LAMP and .NET without changing the price. Switching from MySQL to MS SQL is $5/month price difference but .NET can obviously work with MySQL if price is a concern. I mention this product because your requirements (disk space and bandwidth) do not vary based on the technology.

Disclaimer: I'm a Rackspace employee and Mosso is a Rackspace company.

Answer 8

This isn't really an answer to your question (other folks have done a good job of that), but have you thought of offloading your static resources, which are likely to take up the bulk of your disk space, to something like Amazon's S3? That way, only your application code and database would be stored on the Windows host.