The term (phase) “Linux Hosting” refers to a web hosting service provided form a Linux OS (Unix) based web server. Various Liunux distributions are used as server operating systems. Most of the well known, reliable Internet hosting providers run Linux distributions on their web servers.

Linux OS and Linux based servers are very popular because of the open source software collaboration, which allows the source code to be used, modified and redistributed from anyone. The distribution could be commercial or non-commercial under the GNU General Public License. The Linux OS is packaged in a format known as a Linux distribution. Some of the most popular Linux distributions used on web servers are Red Hat Enterprice Linux, CentOS, Debian, (Ubuntu), Fedora and openSUSE.

Often the term Linux Hosting refers to L.A.M.P Hosting service.

The term LAMP platform stands for: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. Linux OS distributions are the core of the L.A.M.P. server software combination. It is the most popular among the web developers because of its stability and flexibility.

Apache is a open source HTTP Server management software and is probably the most popular web server automation program. It is developed and maintained by a large community of developers with the help of the Apache Software Foundation. The Apache is available for Unix, GNU, FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris, Novell, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows  and other operating systems.

MySQL is a relational database management system (RDBMS), which when run on a server, provides multi-user access to a number of databases. There are more than 10 million servers that run MySQL.

PHP is a programming language designed for producing dynamic web pages and is used mainly in server-side application software. Perl and Python are also programing languages.