PHP vs .NET (Windows vs Linux)

[chadavan]

OK,

I am well aware that this has probably been hashed out a billion times. I am a .NET guy. I am not a great .NET guy, but that is what I have been familiar with for a long time now. My only experience with PHP has been with several third party products - making small changes as needed.

I have a huge project I'll be working on. I'll be moving into a project management role and will be slightly involved in coding. So, different than before, the language does not matter. We'll be hiring personnel for this project and bringing in at least 1 expert in the language that we go with.

I've been teetering on the subject for quite some time and thought I get a last round of opinions before I make a final decision.

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the project
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The project will be a high volume website. We are expecting to add about 40-80 servers to handle the traffic. Linux makes sense here, but again, I am more familiar with Windows. The linux fans tell me that load balancing in Linux is much easier than Windows. Though Windows people will argue that point.

There will be a large amount of flash movies watched from the site. From what I have heard so far about Silverlight, is that it runs much thinner than Flash.

I have more faith in SQL Server than mySQL from a large scale standpoint.

I have several third party components in .NET that will speed up development, if done in NET.

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If there is any thing you can add to sway me in either direction, I would appreciate it.

[UFTimmy]

Without knowing anything about your project I can't offer much help, except that if you're gong to be spending the money on 40-80 servers (I think you're greatly over estimating your need) then you may want to take some more time to research this rather than posting on a relatively amateur PHP message board.

[risoknop]

Being you I would probably hire some professional web development / programming consultant and let him make a comprehensive analysis of pros and cons of both ways... Be sure to find somebody with rich experience with both PHP/Zend/Symfony and .NET so you won't get biased response.

Asking here, as UFTimmy's already said, isn't going to give any great insight as I doubt many people here have ever worked on such a huge project. In addition, we would need more specifics of the project to be able to help and certainly you are not going to share such information with random people on internet forum.

[Mark Baker]

I have more faith in SQL Server than mySQL from a large scale standpoint.

PHP isn't limited to mySQL as a database though, there's plenty of databases that can run on Linux including Oracle... if the project is as large as you're saying, then Oracle should never be dismissed even though it isn't free.

[logic_earth]

PHP isn't limited to mySQL as a database though, there's plenty of databases that can run on Linux including Oracle... if the project is as large as you're saying, then Oracle should never be dismissed even though it isn't free.

In fact Microsoft even provided PHP with a driver to communicating with MS SQL Server.

[felgall]

Two areas where the biggest differences will probably be found.

1. Cost - with a Microsoft based solution you will need to purchase all of the software (operating system, server, database etc) as well as the hardware. With an alternate solution there are free versions of all the software available (although you may still do better to buy some of the software if you go that way).

2. You are probably more likely to find people used to working on really big projects who have a .NET background. That doesn't mean it isn't possible to scale alternative solutions up to handle something of that size, just that the people you find are not as likely to have experience with the issues associated with something that big.

[Mark Baker]

In fact Microsoft even provided PHP with a driver to communicating with MS SQL Server.

True enough... although MS SQL Server won't run on Linux, so it would probably entail a mixed network of Windows servers for MS SQL Server and Linux servers for Apache/PHP... though Apache/PHP will run on Windows as well (and even provide access to the .COM extension for accessing MS Office files if necessary). Or PHP can run with IIS, so it is possible to mix and match, even with PHP.

[UFTimmy]

I routinely pull from MS SQL servers using PHP/Linux, via ODBC. Never had a problem. Most of our stuff is on mySQL servers, but some external systems use MS Server and I need to pull data from there.