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Does this only run on a Mac? If yes, who would want to use a Mac as a production web server?

• loewenskind 16y ago
  Why not? It's easy to administer, has administrative capabilities similar to Linux and it's pretty stable. I'd rather have production Mac servers than Windows servers personally.
  • acdha 16y ago
    It also has no real support, even at the enterprise level[1]. At MacWorld 2009, the entire Mac IT speakers track agreed that their best move had been switching all of their servers to Linux, hands-down, simply because Apple isn't interested in being a serious player in the server space. If you're a small design shop, yeah, an XServe is probably going to be fine but if your needs are any more serious this is a lot of risk to take for generally more expensive servers. [1] Simple example: 10.5.2 broke NFS permissions so non-owners could not write to files. The phone support could do nothing about this and we had two choices: wait months for the next fix, patch darwin ourselves and run with a custom kernel (i.e. completely unsupported), or use a different server. The situation's not much better on the hardware side.
  • zppx 16y ago
    No package management, some services simply breaking between upgrades, the lack of a package management can turn it to be horrible to deal with needed third party software when security flaws arise if you have more than one server running.