It's fairly easy to find commercial Windows hosting companies. So, it's fairly "up to date."

The better question is whether the proprietary Windows tools and technologies will better suit your purpose than alternate platforms will. In many corporate intranets, Windows is the preferred platform, because the user and security administration are already handled though Windows Active Directory, and companies want to use Outlook and Internet Explorer as user applications. So, it makes sense to host on Windows, and develop Web sites in .NET framework, as opposed to Java/Javascript/AJAX or competing scripting/animation mechanisms.

What'd ya have in mind?

But if you're just looking for a web host, and not trying to have an "enterprise wide solution", you most likely don't need to pay the additional cost of Windows hosting.

Well, a current client's site is hosted on a win2003 server. The company itself is very small and mainly email dependent. They want to add a forum and blog to their current site. But I'm running into issues from the get go, as mist of the installations I have done are on Apache server dealies.

uh most, that is. And of those installations, they were either 1 click installs, or manual.

Windows hosting is pretty common, but it costs more due to licensing.

Also, there's nothing that says you can't run Apache/PHP/MySQL/etc on Windows. Of course, if IIS is already running on :80 then you can't have two things bound to the same port. But there are tons of blogs that run ASP.NET et cetera.

okey doke. Thanks all!

fucking windows.

my sentiments exactly, quonsar.

Windows Server X is good for some things - acting as a Web server is definitely not one of them. There are two main reasons Windows hosting costs more - almost nobody wants it, so it's a small market and the admin workload is much higher.

One of the things that Windows Server X is very good for is acting as a coaster.

Mac OS Data Center Edition, on the other hand, is The Joint.