Linux is the most commonly used operating system (OS) for servers in the world today. The reason for this is due to it being open source, having high security and speed, and of cause its free software. Linux was first created as a standard desktop solution to compete with other operating systems such as MINIX and Windows.

With Linux being open source, this meant that programmers from all over the world were able to give their input on the OS, and also resolve any bug fixes with quicker turn around than other paid OS’s. This only added to the popularity of Linux, and soon a number of versions quickly emerged, each with different features and abilities.

It wasn’t until the release of the Apache HTTP Server, that Linux took off as a web server. With Apache also being open source and free, this created a perfect marriage with the OS and so the Linux server was born. Of cause that isn’t the end of the story, a number of other technologies and features were invented after this point to improve the way in which servers are used and run.

Although almost any version of Linux can run as a web server, there are a number of versions that have been specifically written with a web server environment in mind. These include:

• Red Hat (Commercial)
• CentOS
• Ubuntu
• Fedora

Red Hat Linux is the most popular paid distribution for servers, where as CentOS is the most popular free distribution for servers. Ubuntu is a new distribution of Linux release in 2004. It focuses on usability making it easy to manage and so, is quickly being adopted into the web server community. Fedora is a continuation of Red Hat before it become commercial.

Around the time that Apache was released, both PHP and MYSQL were also released. These both form a major part of the Linux web server today. PHP is a server side script processor allowing us to create dynamic web pages, whilst MYSQL is a database solution with scripting capabilities. MYSQL allows us to manipulate data whilst still in a database and then outputs the processed data to a PHP file, which can then further process the data if needed.

Even thought apache was originally written for Linux based systems, it can now be used on almost any operating system thanks to the contributions of the open source community. The same can also be said for PHP and MYSQL, making all three products the most complete and popular web server package available.