Microsoft Cheaper For Web Serving?

Tinman_au asks: "Bink.nu has an article titled "Leading Belgian Hosting Provider Realizes Lower TCO on Windows than Linux" that asks the following: 'Many total cost of ownership (TCO) studies have reaffirmed that TCO of a large enterprise infrastructure based on Microsoft Windows Server 2003 is lower than one based on Linux. But what about TCO in a Web hosting environment?' In the table of figures, the cost area breakout lists labour for Fedora at 77.88% with Windows .NET with SQL Server 2005 as only 53.15%. Admittedly, the report was done by Microsoft itself, so I guess it couldn't exactly be considered impartial, but not being a web admin I found myself wondering, is Windows really that much easier to look after in a web server environment, or has Microsoft fudged some numbers?"

Re:Item-by-item comparison

[Hijacked Public]

Why would it use less bandwidth?

Patch Tuesday?

Hmmm... ? Huh? What?

[Fallen Kell]

Well, it takes me approx 1.5 hours to setup a new webserver from scratch (i.e. no OS installed, no formated or partitioned disks, etc., nothing), which runs Solaris 10 (I know, it is not OSS yet, but will be soon), my own custom compiled Apache from latest source release, PHP, and MySql.

Trying to figure out how that is more expensive then Windows. If anything, I just saved myself 6 hours of patching the OS from WindowsUpdate (update, reboot, update for the updates, reboot, update for the updates to the updates, reboot, update one more time, reboot, check that there are finally no more updates). That is correct everyone. Last time I installed Windows XP Pro, it took 4 windows update sessions before there were no more patches left, and it was an SP2 install disk as well, just imagine if you had the original WinXP Pro disk, add 2 more windows update rounds to that number (SP1 and then SP2).