h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I tend to favor non-proprietary software, so would recommend Linux.

(yeah, I'm biased )

For a fairly simple site, with little in the way of custom cgi or php stuff, I'd say there's probably little difference, except maybe for better security under Linux.

But a lot depends on the savvy of the hosting company, especially in terms of implementing security updates, performing regular backups and other maintenance.

If you're getting a web hosting service you probably shouldn't have to worry about all the following nonsense. The company you hire should take care of the technical details for you. However, I would generally recommend Linux for web hosting and for server applications in general.

Linux has the major established solution for web hosting (the LAMP stack) and so tends to be better supported for it. For example, last year I tried out Apache Tomcat on my Windows machine and had a whole load of trouble with getting it to run as a service, which really should have been unnecessary for a supposedly mature product.

Also, Linux has some technical advantages where it is more sensibly designed. Windows crashes more often, usually if it is left running for a few days, whereas Linux systems commonly run for months or even years without rebooting. Windows is also much more vulnerable to attack. It's also possible to run into Windows' networking socket limit, but that would only be an issue if you were having thousands of simultaneous website hits.

I actually had the thought to call tech support at GoDaddy and ask what the difference was The only reason to use Windows instead of Linux, according to the tech, was if you already had a site built with... Front Page, I think it was...? Anyway, for someone who had nothing as yet, he suggested Linux, so that's what I went for.

And I figured someone would come plug Linux

What the bouncy one said

Also, the GoDaddy tech is right

I'm sometimes accused of being a Linux fanatic , so was attempting to seem less so by not 'plugging' it..

LAMPP (Linux Apache MySQL Php Perl) is a fun and educational way of setting up your very own http server. -- http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-linux.html
Although a similar system can be set up under MS Windows, (WAMPP), it is much, much easier to do so using Linux as the base OS

You can even run a full-fledged LAMPP system from a live-cd -- http://slampp.abangadek.com/wiki/wikka.php?wakka=HomePage

Microsoft Office Frontpage is about as inter-operable as the rest of MS Office products, which is to say not very.

Touted as a WYSIWYG html editor/website administration tool, in reality Frontpage is a dreadful monstrosity spawned by Micro$oft, in their never-ending quest to rule teh innertubes with proprietary, closed-source, inferior software.

Depending on what kind/size website you want, there are much better, free html editors available, such as NVU -- http://www.net2.com/nvu/ or even better, content management systems, such as e107 -- http://e107.org/news.php , which allow you to focus on content, rather than format/design of each page.

i use notepad and then save the file as .html

Well, at the risk of starting an IDE war, you might like to try Notepad++ and turn on HTML or XHTML highlighting Pingu.

Or Notepad2.

gEdit has syntax highlighting options too. It's the default plain text editor on my Ubuntu machine. And with a few plugins it can be persuaded to open files directly from FTP and save them back. Web editing on the fly. You need something like WeBuilder to do that on Windows.

I've had problems with GoDaddy. FileZilla by default will attempt to upload two fles at a time. You can change that in the settings to anything between 1 and 5. For GoDaddy, I had to set it to 1. Any more produced error messages.

Also, you cannot directly conect to their MySQL servers, which is unlikely to be a problem for a simple static site, but is a pain and a nuisance for more complex content-management systems.

TRiG.

I've just switched 3 of my sites to HostPapa. When I rang their support with a question they answered in 4 rings. That alone was enough to persuade me to sign up with them, their package prices just backed up that it was the right decision.