Factors of Ranking

There would be no drop in search engine ranks by switching from Linux to Windows hosting as search engines don't care what OS the website is hosted on as they look at the content of your web pages.

Viruses are not something you need to worry about in regards to web hosting on shared web servers as the web servers are setup to be locked down so customers would be unable to execute a virus on the server. We also use virus scanning to check users files do not contain viruses.

Our mail servers also scan incoming emails for viruses using a Linux based virus scanner (yes there are Linux viruses scanners and Linux can also be infected with viruses), this removes any viruses that are sent to you in your email.

Viruses are computer programs written by people for all computers systems whether it be a Server, PC, MAC, or Linux. The reason why there is an urban myth that only Windows can be infected by viruses is that most viruses are written for the Windows Desktop OS (eg, Vista and XP) as these are the most popular computer systems and so viruses written for these OS's would have the most impact.

We use Microsoft Windows 2008 web servers which have many advantages over Linux such as support for Microsoft ASP.NET, classic ASP, as well as the new native support for PHP under FastCGI which gives a multi threaded environment for PHP which gives better performance that under Linux/Apache web servers.

We also use isolated applications pools for each website, this means that each web site runs in it's own Windows process isolated from other web site processes running on the same server. This gives much better performance, reliability, and security.