I received a website distress call from a friend last night.

He had recently moved a site from a Linux Server to a Windows Server, both running the latest PHP installations.

However, what he had overlooked is that some functionality often used by PHP developers is actually Linux, or more specifically Apache Server, exclusive functionality.

For those of you with technical knowledge, I am talking about the .Htaccess and .Htpassword files, which in this case were needed to password restrict folders on a website.

I managed to find a solution for his website, and all is now well.

The moral of this story is that if you are moving web servers, double check that all of your website's functionality is catered for on the new server.

Whilst Windows / IIS server will run PHP, and very well, it will not support Apache functionality natively.

Similarly, Linux servers running Chillisoft ASP claim to run ASP scripts, but there will be limitations to the capabilities of websites running in such a way.