ms windows is byfar less stable than unix

no completely no.

Macintosh is based upon Unix, so when you compare the 2, you are comparing a type of unix and windows. Unix is generally thought of as safer and less susceptible to attack by viruses.

One of the major advantages of unix based hosting is that unix is free, so the cost is not an issue. Another cost benefit is that several free applications are available for Unix based servers so the money that would have been allotted to this could be utilized elsewhere. Unix is also very efficient because less system resources are required which means less bandwidth and RAM are used. This results in a smoother and faster site. Many languages were developed using Unix as well. This means that there are more applications will be able to run on your site than if you had chosen another platform.

You can view the content of any file (text or not) in Unix by using any editor or filter or pager program, such as 'less', 'more', 'cat', 'vi', etc.