Netfirms Inc., a web hosting provider, on February 7th, 2007, said that it would begin letting customers build and host websites running both Windows and Linux applications at the same time.

The company claimed it is the first web hosting provider to let customers use both Windows and Linux applications and code through a single web hosting account. Customers can subscribe to plans at Netfirms that start at $14.95 per month for a website with 150GB of disk support.

"We have traditionally been a Linux host, but a lot of developers were starting to feel enclosed. They may want to run an application or develop functionality using Windows technology but not get a separate account or website," said to Thomas Savundra, the company's President.

In particular, there has been demand for ASP.Net 2.0, the update to Microsoft's web application development platform that was released in November 2005, from web developers who were formerly exclusively loyal to the Lamp stack, that is, Linux, Apache Web server, MySQL database and PHP programming languages, the release quoted Savundra.