People are talking about session...
Almost all server side technologies today support custom session providers, where you can hook up some code to share you session between different HTTP modules and binders.
If you are starting to write a web site from scratch, and you need to write all of your code for yourself, than probably you will choose to do it in one programming language (only for your comfort of coding).
But... where it's all starting to change? When you want to mash-up some open source and community source code to make a web site. Let's say a store & community with ASP.NET to mix up with CRM like Sugar CRM (which is in PHP).
In that case you don't need any session sharing, just users sync procedure in the DB.
Also, if you choose IIS 7 (Windows Server) or Apache (using Mono project you can run ASP.NET on LAMP), you could run them both on the same machine.
And remember, the most important thing is TIME TO MARKET! So saving code time can be crucial for you success.
ENJOY!