Knowledge base
Comparisons & Buyer's Guides
Head-to-head evaluations for hosting decisions: distributions, panels, web servers, databases, and stacks — measured, not marketed.
10 topics · 10 articles
- Linux Distributions for Servers Compared
Ubuntu LTS, Debian Stable, Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux, and CloudLinux all host websites well — and differently. Ubuntu brings freshnes…
- Security Linux Distributions Compared
Kali, Parrot OS, and BlackArch all ship hundreds of testing tools out of the box — and serve different operators. Kali (by Offensi…
- Hosting Control Panels Compared
cPanel, Plesk, DirectAdmin, and CyberPanel all promise to tame server administration — at very different prices and philosophies. …
- Web Servers Compared: Apache vs Nginx vs LiteSpeed
Apache's flexibility, Nginx's event-driven efficiency, and LiteSpeed's cPanel-native speed solve the same problem with different t…
- MySQL vs MariaDB vs PostgreSQL
MySQL, its MariaDB fork, and PostgreSQL cover nearly all web hosting database needs — with different strengths. MariaDB tracks MyS…
- Linux vs Windows Server
Linux dominates web hosting on cost, transparency, and automation; Windows Server dominates where Active Directory, .NET Framework…
- PHP 7 vs PHP 8 Compared
PHP 8 brought the JIT compiler, union types, attributes, match expressions, and years of optimizer work on top of PHP 7's already-…
- Backup Solutions Compared
JetBackup, Acronis, Restic/Borg, and native cPanel backups all protect servers — with different granularity, destinations, and pri…
- WordPress Caching Plugins Compared
LiteSpeed Cache, WP Rocket, and W3 Total Cache all speed up WordPress — through different philosophies. LSCache is free and deepes…
- Monitoring Tools Compared
Zabbix, Nagios, Netdata, and HetrixTools/Uptime Kuma cover different monitoring jobs: deep metrics and alerting, legacy extensibil…
Field notes
Fair comparisons share three disciplines most published benchmarks skip: identical workloads, default-plus-documented tuning on both sides, and full version disclosure. A benchmark that tunes one contender and motorboats the other past defaults is marketing with charts — read methodology sections before conclusions, always.
Total cost beats license price in nearly every platform decision we've modeled. Admin hours, incident frequency, migration risk, and hiring availability dwarf license deltas within two years. The spreadsheet that only prices licenses is how organizations buy cheap platforms and expensive operations.
Date-stamp every comparison you rely on, including ours. Platforms evolve fast — today's underdog ships tomorrow's killer feature, EOL dates flip recommendations overnight, and pricing changes rewrite TCO mid-contract. A comparison without versions and dates is a rumor with formatting.
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