Good language to learn in order to build small websites

Question

I want to start building websites and charging people for them!

My problem is that the stack that know well does not lend itself to quick development, or cheap hosting.

I am looking for languages that satisfy the following criteria:

• Fast to develop in
• Can find cheap hosting for it
• Bonus points if it can also be 'enterprisey'

Answer 1

I'd recommend PHP. It's well supported, quick to learn, and relatively common among small web hosts.

Answer 2

Use a framework such as drupal

Answer 3

Your requirements are super-vague... But to recommend something different, try out the Ruby on Rails - it is really fast, can get enterprisey and there is at least heroku.com for hosting.

Answer 4

Fast to develop in: When building a web application, what makes a language quick to develop in is a framework. Some languages that have a very robust web application framework include: Java, Ruby, PHP, Python.

Can find cheap hosting for it: PHP is probably the most ubiquitous language in terms of web hosting support. More web hosts are adding support for Ruby and Python frameworks such as Rails and Django, though.

Bonus points if it can also be 'enterprisey': Not quite sure what you mean by that. But for some reason Java comes to mind.

Answer 5

I have done a few sites on the side as well and have wanted cheap hosting, speedy development etc.

I ended up just using GAE simply because:

• You can use either Python/Java (both are widely used)
• You can used current web frameworks (Django etc.)
• It's free hosting (until the site starts hitting the free quota limits)
• Deployment is easy

One downside could be that you're tied to BigTable so if you wanted to move your site to something else you might have some work there.

(I'm not advocating for GAE, just have used it for a few sites and it has worked pretty good for what was required)