Chris Boylan .com

While the internet performance licensing fight rages on, I've written about it last week and the week before, so it's time for a good old website break.

I was in a conference call with a potential web design client when the topic of web hosting came up. This is one of the most fundamental pieces of a website, but it is rarely discussed or thought about since, like referees, it is only noticed when it messes up. (Webmasters are often treated the same way.)

In discussing their web hosting situation, I realized that they didn't really understand the pros and cons of ASP.NET vs. PHP, IIS vs. Apache, and Windows Server vs. Linux. This conversation didn't even begin to delve into the differences between databases like MySQL and MS SQL Server.

Wait! Before your eyes glaze over, I'm not going to break out the technical differences, since for the vast majority of websites every one of those tools is capable of doing the job and their relative costs are similar (except for SQL Server. That's really expensive - like thousands of dollars.)

Now lets take a look at our choices:

While the internet performance licensing fight rages on, I've written about it last week and the week before, so it's time for a good old website break.

I was in a conference call with a potential web design client when the topic of web hosting came up. This is one of the most fundamental pieces of a website, but it is rarely discussed or thought about since, like referees, it is only noticed when it messes up. (Webmasters are often treated the same way.)

In discussing their web hosting situation, I realized that they didn't really understand the pros and cons of ASP.NET vs. PHP, IIS vs. Apache, and Windows Server vs. Linux. This conversation didn't even begin to delve into the differences between databases like MySQL and MS SQL Server.

Wait! Before your eyes glaze over, I'm not going to break out the technical differences, since for the vast majority of websites every one of those tools is capable of doing the job and their relative costs are similar (except for SQL Server. That's really expensive - like thousands of dollars.)

Now lets take a look at our choices: