Website development in ASP.NET MVC in Mono or Make the break to PHP

Question

Hi

I have an idea for a website which i would like to run with. My background has always been in the microsoft products, originally coming up from a VB6/ASP to C# and ASP.Net webforms. I love the new asp.net MVC architecture but am worried if my site takes off and i have to scale it, i will be stuck with exhorbitant hosting fees.

Im considering using ASP.NET MVC with mono but am wondering whether i shouldnt just bite the bullet and switch to php with a framework like Zend. I would rather stick with asp.net MVC using mono and running on a linux box, but all the Garbage Collection issues with Mono worry me. My question is has anyone used it and scaled it for web developent or should i throw in the towel and join the LAMP ranks? Any serious suggestions without the fanboy comments on either side of the fence would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

Not sure where people get the idea that windows hosting is hideously expensive. Especially once you get to the point where you need dedicated facilities, at which point the expenses of the bandwidth, power and monitoring take care of any licensing fees you'd need to worry about.

Answer 2

If you're worried about costs, Microsoft has a program to help startups - the BizSpark program gives you an MSDN subscription as well as production licenses for Windows Server and SQL Server. And if your site really takes off you'll need a dedicated box or a VPS. If you are renting a box (not colo) hosting on Windows is only slightly more expensive than Linux - and some on some providers Windows is not more expensive at all.

With that said, I do .net during the day and build my side projects on Rails.

Answer 3

Stick with technology that suits you the best, in which you are most productive. Don't switch just because of possible issues some day, LAMP for sure has it's own problems.

If your web site has so much visitors that you must scale to one or several dedicated servers, then you should have money for licenses, IMHO. Shared hosting on win is aslo cheap, and with speed of win server 2008+mvc, you can be several times faster than LAMP, so hw costs are lower.