The first thing you need to make sure before you consider hosting services for your websites is your requirements. The disk space and bandwidth can be considered as the second priority, however, the most important one is the hosting platform. Hosting platform as in the operating system you need on the hosting package or the server. The 2 most preferred operating systems in the web hosting industry are Linux and Windows. Mostly, Linux is preferred as it is preferred, however, If you intend to develop your site using ASP, FrontPage, ASP.NET environment, Windows Streaming Media, Access, MS SQL Server, or any of the other Microsoft’s owned technologies then you should opt for Windows.
Now, if you consider a web hosting package, the operating system is common for all the hosting packages on the same server, however, this is not the case when it comes to dedicated server hosting. If you consider a dedicated server to host your websites and applications, you will get an option to choose the operating system. If you consider Linux, there are different flavors of it, however, Windows dedicated servers have different versions and editions of the Windows operating system. When it comes to the different operating systems of Windows dedicated server hosting, the operating systems have various capabilities, limitations, features etc. which differ them from each other. However, you may find some of the things which are common in all the operating systems of Windows dedicated servers and one of them is the partitioning which is required. Partitioning the operating system of Windows dedicated server hosting is necessary and this is done with the help of some formats. These formats are NTFS and FAT and out of these 2, NTFS is preferred and the reason and difference between them is given below :
NTFS :- New Technology file system (NTFS) is a much more stable format of partion and is the newest. If a NTFS partion becomes corrupt, it can sometimes be recovered with special software. NTFS can also recognize more space on a Hard Drive and is a much more efficient and faster format to use. It has been used from a long time as FAT was a very old format for partitioning the Windows operating system on dedicated server hosting. It is used not only for Windows 2003 and Windows 2008 operating systems which are mostly installed on the Dedicated servers but it is also used for operating systems like Windows XP and Windows Vista which are used for local machines and not for dedicated web hosting.
FAT :-FAT is a very old sort of format and goes all the way back to windows 95. It can only recognize a very small hard drives full space. If a FAT partion becomes corrupt then its next to impossible to recover it. A FAT partion has more of a chance of becoming corrupt if your computer or server on which you have Windows 95 (generally, not found now) crashes. FAT32 is a better version of this format but is still flawed. If EVER offered a choice between FAT and NTFS format then it is recommended that you pick NTFS especially for Windows dedicated server as the data on the dedicated server is very important . It will pay off in the future and straight away.
