Royal throne flushes out Linux

Linux has been dismissed as the operating system of choice for the Royal Family's web servers after doing just two years at Her Majesty's pleasure.

All government websites were moved over to Linux in 1999 when a decision was made to replace the ageing Sun Solaris platform that preceded it.

Red Hat and Apache were chosen because the Government Information Service Systems team just happened to have copies "lying around".

But at the end of last month the British Monarchy website was relaunched with "a clean, crisp graphical interface, using web technologies including Flash and DHTML".

The new site is hosted by CCG.XM, a division of the Cordiant Communications Group, on a Microsoft IIS server. CCG.XM apparently uses IIS as standard and doesn't have an open source alternative.

When the move to Linux was made in 1999 the government IT team was quoted as saying that Linux "could easily handle the job". But the government agency has since ended its hosting operations.

As the new power behind the throne, IIS now takes on the royal burden of two million page impressions a month.