Why is there so much advice to avoid windows servers ?

[PatF]

I'm wondering why so many people here strongly advise users not to host their zencart sites on windows servers. I'm not that technical at all myself and have no experience with unix or linux servers which is why I went with windows. A lot of the add ons and even advice in the forum here is directed towards non windows servers and kind of leaves me feeling like a left hander learning guitar from a standard teach yourself guitar book. Simple things like file permissions are a different beast on windows.

Just wondering what are the advantages / disadvantages of the other servers over windows (apart from the fact that there are more sites hosted on others and advice and documentation is therefore weighted towards them)

[kobra]

Just wondering what are the advantages / disadvantages of the other servers over windows

Basically, the AMP protion of the requirements ( Apache, MySQL, PHP) - are not native to the windows environment and are usually setup under the windows IIS server environment.

Not being native, causes most issues as well as the method that a host configures the server.

A "nix" server natively operates on the AMP stack and is just a cleaner way of doing things....

One does not normally require intimate knowledge of UNIX or LINUX to manage a hosted account