14 DAY TRIAL // On April 15, the development team behind the powerful ownCloud self-hosted cloud server announced that the upcoming ownCloud Server 8.1 application would no longer support the Microsoft Windows operating system.
The decision has been made because the Microsoft Windows Server support in ownCloud has not been ideal for a long time, and it always required all sorts of workarounds. However, users will still be able to install the ownCloud Sever on Windows operating systems (see below for details).
"After much deliberation with our team, an analysis of the pros and cons of this move - we have decided to stop support for Windows as an ownCloud application server," reads ownCloud's announcement. "Despite this, it is still possible to get ownCloud running on a Windows server."
ownCloud promises to provide a migration utility that will have users running ownCloud Server 8, which will receive stability updates and security patches for a few more months, to easily migrate their data to a Linux server.
XAMPP and Bitnami can be used to deploy ownCloud on Windows
As mentioned, even if ownCloud Server 8.1 will not support Windows as a server platform natively, there will be many other methods of installing it, such as by using the Bitnami or XAMPP software bundles that include everything you need to deploy a self-hosted cloud server in minutes.
ownCloud is a very powerful PHP application and the platform of choice for ownCloud users has always been Linux, which provides a very stable, secure and reliable server environment. Unfortunately, the PHP packages on Windows are not always up-to-date and require many patches.
The ownCloud developers insist on informing their dedicated users that the decision to drop Windows support from future ownCloud Server releases has been made because they need to concentrate their efforts on new features, instead of patching issues that shouldn't be there in the first place.