The cost for windows isn't really a pressing concern for business--even startup business.

But the thing is if you go with windows, you're eventually going to have to support linux too just to get a the wealth of open-source codebases like say Redis. I mean its certainly possible to run Redis on windows via cygwin but you're 32-bit limited, and its a pain to actually install and get everything working.

On Fedora it's "yum install redis", and you're done.

Can't Redis run on Windows proper? I thought I've seen actual Windows builds of Redis?

The last I heard Redis on windows native as a wontfix: http://code.google.com/p/redis/issues/detail?id=34

That's simply not true, BizSpark makes the cost of Windows into a rounding error.

That may be so, but how readily can you automate server setup? I am getting pretty handy with ubuntu VMs plus apt to get from a fresh install to "entire stack installed and configured" in an afternoon. The fact that nearly all of the software is available freely online speeds things up for me.