A good cloud-based hosting has many beneficial characteristics, some of which include on-demand self-service, broad network access, and being very elastic and scalable. These characteristics allow for a large number of users to benefit from the service at any time of the day and at a very fast speed due to the broad network access.
Windows and linux are best in my opinion! Linux is not used by many people but a lot of apps can't be used for linux so best is to use windows. But Mac is not bad too. Hope I helped and have a nice day!