Therefore the cost benefit of using Linux as webservers would certainly tilt the balance in its favour. Add to that the fact that Linux can handle higher loads and the choice should be clear..

Pallav

They are probably right, but it is a bit misleading. For most websites the performance difference will not matter. A site that gets a couple thousand hits a day could be handled on a X Server running OS x without too much difficulty.

Heavy load sites could improve performance by switching to Linux, but at the cost of ease of use. My main website runs Linux, as are my other sewrvers. I would not argue that Linux is easier to use and maintain than OS X though. For a client without an experienced administrator and moderate to low load OS X could easily justify its cost and performance hit based on maintainability ands lwer admin threshold.