hi...

We currently have a website which is based on ASP and MS SQL.

We also have 2 sister websites which we will now be moving to their own domains (ASP and MS SQL based). We are adding new features to our website such as shopping carts and many of our own features which we will be developing from scratch. We need all the 3 websites to interact with each other. So I was planning on switching from ASP to ASP.Net

We were looking for a new host and we found ASP hosting to be more expensive when compared with linux. Since our's is a small company, money matters.

My supervisor wants to switch our website to PHP and mySQL. Our website is pretty big and converting would take atleast a month.

Do you think it will be a good idea to switch to PHP and mySQL or continue with ASP.Net.

Also how is PHP when it comes to communicating detween different websites. I haven't worked on PHP for over 2 years and I know a lot has changed.

Any help will be appreciated.

As I see it, you have a few options (none of them are ideal) :

You should consider paying for a reliable host, instead of rewriting the entire codebase (which would mean more cost in terms of downtime, etc).

OR

You might want to start development of your new components on PHP (since PHP can run on Windows servers) and communicate between your PHP components and your ASP.NET components via web services (PHP5 makes writing web services and consumers very easy). You also have the option of using the COM-integration, but in my experience, its not very reliable.

As far as your other question -- PHP is very capable of interoperating between two different servers, services or domains. Especially with PHP5 with built-in SimpleXML and web services components.

I was in a similar boat about developing two websites from scratch. I had an asp.net expert in the family, too. If you go with asp.net then everything is going to cost you more and there is a bigger learning curve. PHP/mysql is free and easy but may take you longer to develop.

I actually use C and Postgresql.

The cost factor for reliable shared ASP/ASP.NET hosting is marginal, unless of course you want unlimited everything for $3.99. :eek:

Rewriting your existing code in PHP will probably cost you more than you can save in 5 years of hosting even on a sub $10 Linux host.

Hosting is one of the reasons we are thinking about moving to PHP.

There are many PHP based applications that are available freely. 2 of them we are looking at are phpAdsNew and phpBB. A good ASP based banner ad mgmt costs over $500. Also many internal software that we currently have are outdated and there are PHP based ones with more features available for free.

We are also planning on moving to a dedicated server from a VPS. The main reason we skipped the dedicated server was the licensing cost of MS SQL.

So overall converting our website to PHP and then integrating it with other open source apps will benefit us on the long run.

You are thinking wrong.

You are only thinking about the cost now, if you invest in a business like this, you don't think about NOW, you think about LATER. You always have to lose money to gain money.

And with .NET framework, you will lose money when you invest, but it will pay off for the future. If you switch to php, you won't have a gain in the future.

Now if your business is looking at some opensource phpads and phpbb, then I don't know exactly what kind of business you guys are, probably not big at all, since you said something about VPS, then if your not big it really doesn't matter if you use php.

But what I would recommend out of these, is actually go with Coldfusion, you pay a good 3000 dollars for Coldfusion MX 7.0 Enterprise Edition, and you get everything you'll ever need, and you will develop your pages 4x faster than any language, with 4x less code.

I am not sure why you would want to move from ASP to PHP. That seems like a irrelevant and time wasteful thing to do. The 2 are almost identically alike, or asp may even be a better choice


Goodluck

There is no guarantee asp.net will go anywhere in the future. Most websites do not use asp.net or even MS software and servers. I know one site that went all MS and spent $20K just to start out and they are a small company. Don't forget the yearly maintenance fees and upgrades.

Ms sucks for servers, go linux, i love php so fast, doesnt cost anything, and easy to learn, i also love mysql, because its easy integration with php.

Some of you guys are script kiddies, still stuck making php "scripts" for others for 5 bucks. I can see that right now. Criminal, you don't even know what you are talking about. What the hell does Linux/Microsoft have to do with servers. I don't think Linux developed Apache. You don't even know how Linux can be better than Microsoft. Lol, Criminal, any database platform can be used with php, there is no such thing as "integration". All database syntax is almost identical, MySQL is poor compared to everything else that is out there. It is extremely poor, please don't come here and post comments about something you don't know, just becuase you are jelous of a multi-billion dollar company, and becuase you heard stuff from other script kiddies that only know how to use echo functions in php.

And drhowarddrfine, you don't know what you're talking about. The majority of large corporations use .net framework, how can you say most websites do not use asp.net? Are you still stuck at the kiddie forums too, where php developers think they are gurus becuase they can do a file include? .NET has already went farther than any other technology, and it will continue to go farther. Microsoft products do not fail, and will NOT fail.

I am not going to sit here and argue with people that haven't used all the technologies, and people who barely know anything they are talking about.

-Matt

I generally stay away from Linux vs. MS and ASP vs. PHP arguments. It is childish and pointless. All I have to say is, a properly coded ASP.NET/MSSQL2K apps will knock the socks off PHP/MySQL app in head-to-head benchmark on the same hardware. Secondly, most of ASP.NET/ASP hosting companies are able to offer PHP and MySQL to our customers just as well as any Linux based host.

The higher cost of ASP.NET hosting is no longer true, most windows hosts are very competitive with Linux crowd and are able to offer wider spectrum of mainstream programming languages and databases.

Yes there is a higher cost involved in building windows host, but that alone deters allot of kiddy hosts that are otherwise giving bad name to the hosting industry because of the higher cost of entry. Just something to think about.

Matt, go to netcraft and learn. Large corporations use .net because they are large and have lots of money and people to throw at the program but she doesn't have lots of money or people for her use. That's why you are lousy at this because you don't know how to solve problems. You know only how to spend other peoples money. Sometimes you have to think and you don't know how to do that.

Since your account was disabled I guess you can't control yourself either.

Just calculate how many it will cost re-write site in PHP and how many month of .NET hosting you can got with same money. And then it will be easy to choose.

Just to follow on from what drhowarddrfine said, plenty of large websites don't use .NET as well and probably have no plans to change e.g:

Yahoo, Amazon, BBC.co.uk, Google (They not large enough for you ShytK?)

It's pretty easy to tell who isn't using it - any one who isn't running Windows (hurray for Microsoft).

Of course, there are plenty of sites that do run quite happily on Windows but MS haven't gained any server market share for months and it's not just because of the cost. Although having said that, in my experience a lot of companies (even quite sizeable ones) are scared to look anywhere else than the MS solution (Linux is a scary word you know).

In response to the original post, a skilled developer shouldn't have any trouble converting ASP code to PHP and it really shouldn't cost a whole lot depending on the size of your current sites. To get the most out of .Net it you may well find it preferable to rewrite a lot of your Classic ASP code anyway.

Like rezinkin said, calculate your costs, consult with your supervisor etc and go from there.

Please do not flame regarding MS vs Linux. I have worked on both and both have their advantages and disadvantages

Our current website needs to be redesigned because its a mess. There have been more that 6 programmers before me who had worked on it and there is a lot of code that needs cleanup. The layout needs to be changed too. This is the best time to re write the website or switch platforms/languages because we are going to be adding a lot of features in the months to come.

Re-writting the website in ASP is not a good solution. I have no experience in ASP.Net. I have done a lot of coding on PHP4. All I need to see is whether PHP5 will help when it comes to communicating between different websites. fyrestrtr mentions that it does scale well. I still need to do more research on it.


Here are the factors why we are looking to get away from MS products.

1. Hosting
We researched many hosts and we wanted to go with a bigger company who have more that 2 datacenters. Our diskspace needs were high. Here MS hosting turned out to be more expensive than Linux. By switching to Linux we can save close to $100/month

2. Database
Our company is small and money does matter. We currently do not have a development DB. We cannot afford to buy MS SQL because of the costs involved. The only affordable version is the developer version which costs around $50.

I know mySQL does not have many features like triggers and so on that MS SQL has, but mySQL 5 (which is in the beta stage) supports them (again not all the ansi features). We do not need those features right now.

3. Local Server
Our local server currently is Windows XP prof based and we need to have a proper server. Windows 2003 is way out of our budget considering the additional licenses we need.

Switching to Linux would cut costs a lot. I have worked on Linux and can manage a linux server.

4. Internal Tools
A lot of additional open source tools/applications required (internal) are available for free but most of the ones we want require and suits us needs a UNIX platform.

Keeping all of this in mind I was thinking about moving towards Linux.

There are a lot of misconceptions in this thread about .net and php on linux. I'm not going to go into a long response about it, because if you really feel like arguing -- take it to the lounge, or google for it. Plenty of other people are wasting time arguing about this stuff.

ruthless: Seems like you have a business case for switching to Linux. However, just because you are switching to PHP, doesn't mean that you application will run better. Bad design is bad design, no matter what the language. So, make sure you plan the conversion/rewrite carefully before you start typing one line of PHP. This is the best way to get the most out of your project.

You mentioned MySQL. Have you looked at PostgreSQL? It has some advanced features not available in the GA releases of MySQL. You mentioned triggers, which are available in PostgreSQL.

Best of luck.

thanks for the replies...

fyrestrtr... I haven't looked at PostgreSQL.

The main reason for sticking with mySQL is that hosting wise I have seen many hosting companies give mySQL DB rather than PostgreSQL.
Please note that these are the hosting companies we were looking at. Also I have worked on mySQL for over 2 years and am familiar with it.

Also it looks my supervisor just wants us to move to a PHP/mySQL based solution.

If you get a dedicated server I'm pretty sure you can install anything you like. As far as .NET vs Linux, yes, you will pay more for .NET hosting, but you also get the advantages of .NET. You can also connect to mysql through .NET, very easily in fact. Not trying to sound condescending, but if you are making your decision based on what people on a forum say, you are maving a very bad decision. Write something in .NET and php, then compare the two. See which is easy to upgrade, make changes, runs faster. Then make your decision. MSSQL is way ahead of MySQL despite what some people will say, but you will have to pay for it. At least it doesn't cost as much as Oracle, though.

If you're trying to compare mysql to mssql then you're not comparing apples to apples though I don't know much about mysql 5.0

You really need to check out postgresql.

Using .net might help you get the job done faster but at a price, assuming you already know .net. If you don't know .net then there is a steeper learning curve.

Hi,

I am not trying ot compare mySQL with mySQL. I have not worked on postgresSQL.

I know mySQL is known for speed and postgres for its features. Right now we really do not need those features although we may need them down the line specially triggers. What we need right now is speed. Also mySQL5 (now is beta) comes with triggers and other features.

I have worked with mySQL and am comfortable working on it and administrating it.

PHP and MySQL is in my opinion the best combination for most things on the web, followed closely by perl and cgi. Im not a big fan of either ASP or MS SQL myself...

Originally posted by ruthless
Hosting is one of the reasons we are thinking about moving to PHP.

There are many PHP based applications that are available freely. 2 of them we are looking at are phpAdsNew and phpBB. A good ASP based banner ad mgmt costs over $500. Also many internal software that we currently have are outdated and there are PHP based ones with more features available for free.

We are also planning on moving to a dedicated server from a VPS. The main reason we skipped the dedicated server was the licensing cost of MS SQL.

So overall converting our website to PHP and then integrating it with other open source apps will benefit us on the long run.

You can Install phpAdsNew on a Windows Box, and Integrate it with your asp.net application, and phpbb runs very well on Windows too, so there is no point on writing all your site again.
And You will find very good prices on Windows Based hosts. Look for H-Sphere hosts and you will see what i mean.

Regards.