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Choice of platform

Web server software is available for virtually all commonly used operating systems: OS/2, Microsoft Windows 3.1 and NT, Apple Macintosh, VMS, UNIX and so on. If you want to run a server on an existing machine or to maintain a homogeneous operating environment within your organization, either of these may be determining factors in the choice of platform. The choice of platform may be influenced by systems currently in use, or by the software, including non-network applications, that you want to run. If the people who will be administering the server have particular expertise in one operating system, selecting server software compatible with that platform may be preferable to staff retraining.

Some organizations consider it worthwhile to purchase a separate machine to host the Web server. This avoids any disruption of server performance due to other applications, and where staff have a range of operating system expertise, the choice of platform is widened.

If the choice is open then some of the issues are:

• The myriad of different UNIX systems means that free software for UNIX is generally distributed in source format, which encourages bug fixes and enhancements that often find their way back into the base system. This means that software for UNIX systems tends to be more innovative than that for other systems.

• There tends to be more commercially available software for platforms that have a single or just a few different machine architectures, such as Apple Macintosh, IBM's OS/2 and Microsoft Windows. This software tends to be easier to install than free software but it may be more difficult to adapt.

• Due to its ubiquity the PC clone represents one of the cheapest choices of hardware platform.

• UNIX was designed to be a multi-tasking operating system and has long been associated with TCP/IP networking. Much has been written about TCP/IP networking software on UNIX systems, which is generally robust, stable and well understood.

If you do not have a system on which to run the server and are thinking of using a UNIX system, an interesting, low-cost possibility is to run a commercial version of UNIX such as Novell's UnixWare, SCO UNIX or BSDi or one of the free UNIX clones such as Linux or BSD386 on a cheap Intel PC. A 486 PC with Linux can cost as little as US$1,000.

If the reliability of your Web service is of critical importance you may need to consider setting up multiple redundant servers with monitoring equipment. This involves having a separate backup machine or machines exactly mirroring the primary server, or some such equivalent arrangement.

Spinning the Web by Andrew Ford
© 1995 International Thomson Publishing
© 2002 Andrew Ford and Ford & Mason Ltd
Note: this HTML document was generated in December 1994 directly from the LaTeX source files using LaTeX2HTML. It was formatted into our standard page layout using the Template Toolkit. The document is mainly of historical interest as obviously many of the sites mentioned have long since disappeared.