Windows Server vs Linux for Web Hosting

Windows Server vs Linux for web hosting

An honest comparison, written by a project that exists because people are on Windows and being told they should not be.

The short version: if you have a free choice and no reason to be on Windows, Linux has more documentation written for it and cheaper licences. If you are on Windows for reasons that are not going away, you are not stuck, nothing is impossible, and you do not have to migrate anything.

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Where Linux genuinely wins

Documentation. Every deployment tutorial for every framework assumes Ubuntu. This is the real gap, and it is bigger than any technical one. It is why people conclude Node "can't" run on Windows.

Licensing. No licence cost, and cheaper VPS pricing as a result.

File system throughput for many small files. npm install writes tens of thousands of tiny files; NTFS plus Defender is measurably slower than ext4 at that. Excluding your sites folder from real-time scanning recovers most of it.

Containers. Docker on Linux is native. On Windows it is a VM, or WSL2, with the overhead that implies.

Memory per site. A Windows Server VM has a higher floor, so a 1 GB box goes further on Linux.

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Where Windows genuinely wins

You already have it. An existing .NET estate, an Active Directory domain, a line-of- business application, a client policy or a compliance requirement. Migrating for the sake of matching a tutorial is not an engineering decision.

.NET. ASP.NET Core is cross-platform now, but the tooling, profiling and operational knowledge are still deepest on Windows.

Domain integration. Group Policy, AD authentication, existing backup and monitoring agents, and an ops team who know where things are.

Remote Desktop. Not a joke — for people who are not comfortable at a shell, being able to look at the machine is worth a lot.

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Where it makes no difference

Node.js itself. Same V8, same APIs, official Windows builds since 2011. For an application whose time goes on the database, the network and your code, the platform is not the bottleneck.

Caddy, nginx, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, Git. All run natively on Windows.

The architecture. App on a loopback port, supervised by the operating system, behind a reverse proxy that terminates TLS. Identical on both. Only the names differ:

Linux	Windows
systemd	Windows Services (WinSW, NSSM)
nginx / Caddy	Caddy
Certbot	Caddy, or win-acme
ufw	Windows Defender Firewall
journalctl	Event Viewer, or the service's own log files
cPanel / Plesk / aaPanel	WinPanel, or Plesk for Windows

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The myths

"Node doesn't run on Windows." It does, natively, and has for over a decade.

"You need IIS." You do not. IIS is a web server for ASP.NET; your Node app is already a web server. It only needs something in front of it for the domain and the certificate.

"You need iisnode." Nine years without a release. See iisnode alternatives.

"Windows can't do zero-downtime deploys." Build in a staging folder, swap with a rename, restart, roll back on failure. See deploying from GitHub.

"You can't host email on Windows." You can. See hosting your own email.

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Practical advice

Staying on Windows? Use the architecture above rather than fighting IIS into a shape it was not designed for. Turn on long paths, exclude your sites folder from Defender, keep the Windows Time service running, and stop IIS holding ports 80 and 443.

Moving to Linux? Your Node code will not need changing. Your deployment scripts, paths and service definitions will.

Running both? Perfectly reasonable. Put the .NET and Windows-tied work on Windows and the rest wherever it is cheapest.

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Related

• Node.js hosting on Windows Server
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