Web Hosting and Web Design For Small Business

The previous answer is right, but if you do have the choice, ASP.NET is a little lower level than PHP. At the same time ASP.NET has some very nice development tools.

I would go with whatever language and platform you are most comfortable with.

ASP.NET is an extremely complete solution. It uses proven Microsoft languages, and fits very well withing Microsoft’s vision of the Internet. If you’re already comfortable with MS languages and you have MS-capable hosting, ASP.NET is a good choice.

ASP.NET makes web page programming reasonably easy, as it borrows a lot from the very popular visual programming model of visual basic, and it uses the .NET languages VB.NET and C#, which are incredibly powerful.

However, .NET does pretty much lock you into MS architecture. While there are some open source alternatives to many .NET technologies, if you want to program in ASP.NET, you’re going to have to do most of your work in Windows, and you’ll need Windows-based hosting, which tends to be more expensive and less reliable than LAMP-based hosting solutions.

If you aren’t already committed to Microsoft, you might consider the PHP / Apache / MySQL combination instead. It does nearly everything that the ASP.NET approach does, but it’s entirely free, works on nearly every architecture known to man (including Windows,) works on free hosting services, and is pretty easy to learn.

I find students who have learned PHP and MySQL have few problems moving to an ASP solution, but traveling in the other direction is more difficult.

I’ve taught both, but for my own work, I almost always go with PHP and MySQL.This is also what I generally recommend to small-to-mid size companies, as the cost for getting a decent PHP / MySQL web presence can be substantially lower (free if you have the skills plus about $10 / yr for a domain name…