At this current juncture there is not a more stable, reliable, and secure operating system available. Microsoft has many critics, and there are those that will rant into the wee hours of the night about Linux and how secure it is. But the facts are simple, and the logic is proven: Microsoft is a 40 Billion dollar company. They put hundreds of millions of dollars more into their software development than any Linux flavor will ever hope to see. Common sense tells us that with those kind of resources, more thorough testing, and more refined development is possible. Although there were many published exploits for Windows 2000, most were reported by Microsoft first, and the problems incurred afterwards were due to system administrators that failed to apply the patches necessary to secure their networks. With Linux, if you are not on top of the network security industry’s e-list, you are apt to find about the latest vulnerability the hard way.

Our firm chose to use all Windows 2K3 servers after participating in the product’s Beta trials for over a year. Within this time we discovered that as where Win2K basically defaulted to “convenience”, Win2K3 defaults to “too secure”. With Win2K any system administrator could set the server up quickly, but at the expense of lower security. Win2K3 is by default completely secure and almost non-functional, it requires a skillful system’s administrator to configure the server for actual use. On a basic install it has considerably less services and ports open than that of a fresh install of most the popular flavors of Linux, and it has been the enduring opinion of our Network Security group that Win2K3 is tighter than any other OS we have seen.

Concerning reliability, Win2K3 is simply amazing. We have several early Beta versions that have been up since their original install. Windows installations, betas no less, up for 8 or 9 months without incident, without reboot: simply amazing. We were as skeptical as anyone might be, but we have been converted. All of our Linux installs have been converted as well, to Windows 2003 Servers. We no longer lease, or support Linux installations, nor do we offer any flavor of Linux on any dedicated or managed plan. Open-Source Operating systems offer the would-be hacker an open book to research potential vulnerabilities. Thanks, but no thanks. We like the source code for our operating system locked up somewhere safe, and not freely downloadable from the Internet.