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We're planning on installing WordPress on Windows Server 2008 to be consistent with the rest of our servers and leverage administrative expertise.

The server will not be running anything else. Are there any gotcha's to be had for Wordpress on Windows versus Linux (outside of server licensing costs)?

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7 Answers

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I've installed Wordpress on my virtual server running Windows Server 2008 R2. Installation was easy, no troubles. I installed PHP using Web Platform Installer. PHP 5.3 performs well on IIS7 and you can also use WP super cache to increase performance. There haven't been any downsides for me so far :)

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Maybe this is slightly unrelated to the original question, but what about permalinks? On the few installations I've done on Windows servers, I've had no luck getting anything but the most basic permalink structure up and running. In contrast, WP interacts with mod_rewrite on Apache almost seamlessly. Is there a workaround for that? – goldenapples Sep 3 '10 at 12:00
@Mika Kolari: Any specs of the Linux system to share you compare against? Or is this windows only? – hakre Sep 9 '10 at 2:06
I've had issues with mailing items but have been able to overcome them with wp-mail plugin – curtismchale Sep 9 '10 at 2:07
I had issues when I was developing a plugin on Windows with unicode. It had something to do with replacing whitespace with preg_replace. When I switched to Linux, the issue went away... – jjeaton Oct 9 '10 at 2:35
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up vote 4 down vote

Given the way that Linux and Windows are licensed, using Linux would cut on the OS licensing costs, and Linux would make a better use of the CPU as you would only load the modules and process you need, with greater flexibility than Windows.

Also, you can run a server-only Linux, which is not possible under Windows, as well as running a headless computer, which you can access using a simple SSH connection. You may want to take a look at DistroWatch:

http://www.distrowatch.com

They will list all the major distros as well as those that are geared towards server configuration. The LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) configuration is what you are looking for.

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up vote 3 down vote

I've used it on both but prefer Linux because I wasn't able to directly manage file permissions with my FTP client in the Windows environment. If you have a choice, choose Linux.

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up vote 1 down vote

I don't think the difference will rely on Wordpress, but more on the server's PHP processor. Depending on the scale and volume of traffic your site will incur, your PHP processor will be the more reliant for success.

There's a few tests of running PHP on Windows vs Linux I have posted below. Google search for 'php performance windows linux'

The data concludes that in regards to the way PHP performs on these platforms, Linux would be the choice for better installation.

p a e s s l e r . c o m / w ebstress/sample_performance_tests/comparing_php_script_performance_on_linux_and_windows

b o i n c . b erkeley.edu/dev/forum_thread.php?id=566

p a e s s l e r.com/webstress/sample_performance_tests/comparing_php_script_performance_on_linux_and_windows

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your links are all broken – Marek Sep 3 '10 at 12:55
Yes, please fix the links. That would be helpful (and maybe get's you the one or other vote up) – hakre Sep 9 '10 at 2:03
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up vote 1 down vote

WordPress doesn't interact with the operational system in any way, so it doesn't really matter. You need DB and web-server so your question would be for instance "do Apache and MySQL behave better on Linux" or "Is Apache faster on Linux, than (IIS) on Windows?".

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Although wordpress could use, for example, certain features of PHP/apache that are much better optimised on one OS or the other. – Bobby Jack Sep 3 '10 at 13:00
Which is yet a matter of behavior of your environment and compatibility OS <-> web-server <-> database server. – vlood Sep 3 '10 at 14:53
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up vote 1 down vote

@goldenapples - I don't yet have the capability to comment so my response to your query goes here. You can install ISAPI_Rewrite on IIS and have it take care of your permalink needs.

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up vote 1 down vote

In any case, in Windows, you are not forced to use IIS7 , can use other options. I would advice to check BitNami Wordpress installer. You can even have a sort of LAMP in windows: http://bitnami.org/stack/wampstack , and install apps like Wordpress as modules, which will use WAMP as common base.

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