Posted by Jerry Stuckle on 09/07/05 21:40

Chung Leong wrote:
> At my place of employment we have a pair of quad-Xeon servers running
> Windows 2000, Apache 2, Microsoft SQL Server, and PHP. We went with the
> Windows route mainly for human resource reason. Everyone here knows
> Windows already, whereas relatively few people know Linux. This makes
> staffing and hiring much easier. Our office desktop support guy, for
> instance, double as our server admin.
>
> Why not ASP.Net and IIS? ASP.Net is a pain to work in while IIS
> administration is still very much a dark art.
>
> So we basically took the route of least unresistance, picking
> technologies that seem most convinient.
>

Chung,

Yes, ASP.Net can be a pain in the posterior. But so can PHP, Perl or
other languages. It's all in what you're familiar with. And any of
these can generally do the job in web programming.

If your programmers weren't familiar with either PHP or ASP.Net, then I
can understand your decision to go the PHP route. It's easier to learn
and many programmers can come up to speed more quickly than ASP.Net. Of
course, it also has the advantage of being more portable.

However, if a large percentage of your programmers were already familiar
with ASP.Net, it would make more sense to go that route, IMHO.

You also might look at the possibility of migrating to Linux/Apache in
the future. I got my first Linux VPS a couple of years ago. I knew
virtually nothing about Linux at the time - and very little about
Apache. But I was able to pick both up in my spare time through some
books and web sites. And now I'm far from an expert - but I consider
myself competent enough to install software (without using the Debian
package manager), make changes to the Apache configuration file, and so
on. I wouldn't sell myself as a Linux admin - but I can handle my own
machines. Of course, I also remember the DOS 1.0 days - so I'm quite
comfortable working from a command prompt - that does make a difference!

My suggestion would be for you to get a test machine and install Linux
and Apache on it. Let people play with the machine (ensure you have
backups of the install - they WILL crash it at some point! :-) ).

The reason I say this is - Windows makes a decent desktop system. But
it has a large amount of unnecessary overhead. For instance, my VPS has
128K of RAM - and I'm not using all of it. I have 3GB of disk space -
but I'm only using a little over 1GB for the actual system. And
response time is great.

I've become a believer in using Linux for website. But I still think
Windows makes a more user-friendly desktop.

--
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Jerry Stuckle
JDS Computer Training Corp.
jstucklex@attglobal.net
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