There are many factors which affect Website availability and performance from end user perspective, namely ISP Internet connection, server location, server parameters, programming language, application architecture and implementation. One of the critical parameters is a selected Operational System (OS). Most users often need to select between Linux and Windows, two popular choices for web servers. By providing free monitoring service, mon.itor.us collected large amount of data to perform a unique analytical research examining OS correlation with uptime and performance.

By performing heuristic OS detection procedures, they come up with statistics which

may be interesting for the community. “We could detect OS platform for around 13,000 websites (while the monitoring base is much higher we either could not detect the OS or the detection likelihood was bellow a reasonable threshold). After removing less frequent OS-es we got 12,089 sites by Week 16. The OS allocation is the following:”

The data illustrates obvious leadership of Linux (60%), with Windows being the next (17%). Almost 2/3 of our
community use Linux as an OS platform.

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