The difference between hosting on windows or linux

What is the difference between hosting on windows or linux?

You would be able to use any operating system to view the pages. Whether you want to host on Windows or Linux determines what operating system you want the host to run. There are standards in the form of protocols (FTP, HTTP, SSH) in place that would solve any communication problems. (The way a mac, windows, or linux computer can all access the same website, because it uses HTTP.)

The main factor in your decision should be what programming languages you want to run. If you want to use PHP/MySQL or Oracle based scripts, I would choose Linux or Unix.

If you want to use ASP.NET or any .NET based scripts, I would choose Windows, as Linux does not support these languages.

In my experience, Linux runs faster and more stable than Windows. But I'm not going to say 'it runs faster period' as that usually leads to flame wars.