A friend wants to start a dating website, she wants me to help her. We still haven't discussed on what platform it'll be developed, but I'm thinking she'll suggest LAMP to save a buck (which is one reason already to chose over ASP.NET already). If the dating website does well, it'll potentially hold a large amount of data (I'm not sure if this would be another reason to consider either ASP.NET or LAMP).
Anyway, I ask this from an ASP.NET developer point of view. I have very little, almost null experience with LAMP, and I don't like it very much either, so if she decides to go with PHP odds are I won't help her. So what would be some good points to bring up when deciding which platform to develop on?
Please be objective, I don't want this to be argumentative or anything, try to stick to facts, not opinions alone.
Thanks!
What generally matter in that kind of choice is :
How much time will it require ?
How much money will it cost
Which is often linked to the time ^^
If you have a lot of experience with .NET and none with Linux/Apache/PHP/MySQL, choosing LAMP will mean that you'll need much more time : a whole lot of new stuff to learn.
It'll also mean that your code will probably not be as good as it would be with what you know.
After, the question is : do a couple of week "cost" more than a few licences ?
Only you and her can decide, there ;-)
If LAMP makes you queasy, you can try ASP.NET over Mono.
IMO the only good reason to move away from a programming environment that you are already experienced with is the one you already mentioned: cost.
You would use LAMP specifically to build appliances. If you're not building appliances, the software cost for ONE server is marginal, and is not worth the tradeoff for moving to a totally different development environment, IMO.
I think the first question is: Which is the target programming language and environment that you have experience with?
Imagine the site will become a success - how do you scale then? LAMP can scale, and so can WISC, but in both scenarios you need people who actually know the environment and who can secure it. If you don't know Linux and MySQL and PHP, how are you going to scale and secure it?
So even though LAMP may be significantly cheaper (The SQL Server license is the heavy part in the WISC stack), after the first hacker attack or downtime, that initial savings may seem marginal compared to the damage.
The other thing is of course the PHP vs. ASP.net/C# decision. If you don't know PHP, then it's a decision of "Not having the application at all" and "Having the application on an expensive stack", unless your partner of course decides to hire someone else to develop that.
Technically, both have their pros and cons, but there are huge websites built on both stacks, so it really boils down to "Which platform can you reliably/comfortably setup and maintain?"
I agree with Pascal. Go with what you feel comfortable with in completing the project and don't forget that YOUR TIME EQUALS MONEY. You have to put a $$ value on your time. LAMP may be cheaper up front but if it winds up taking 1000 extra manhours, then suddenly it's more expensive.
Also take into account the lost opportunity cost in not being able to bring something to market b/c you chose a technology you were not familiar with.
At the end, if the plans are for this to be a business that is successful, the cost of using ASP.NET should be negligible or else I would question the seriousness of the effort.
One argument for the Apache/MySQL/PHP stack is that it's available on most major platforms (Windows/Linux/Mac/BSD/...) and most webhosters provide it as well.
You also find many (as in "huge amounts") of good tutorials, books and other educational stuff about PHP/MySQL.
Apart from that all tools used in the LAMP stack are free (as in "free speech" and also as in "free beer"). ASP.NET is still a proprietary technology owned by Microsoft. I'm not a huge open source fan, but knowing that your tools will remain free to use in any way you want is quite nice.
Of course, if you have no experience with PHP at all and much exp. with ASP.NET it's easier for you to stick with ASP.
If your comfortable with Microsoft products there's nothing to stop you from developing code in .NET and using a free database (however you may need to find/develop a custom database adapter if you are not using free versions of SQL server or Oracle). If you are generating a lot of traffic you can swap out the data layer of your code and invest in a better performing database.
Time costs money and if you can develop a better product both from a user and maintenance/performance perspective it will serve you better in the long run.
Some hosting companies include the OS and flexible contracts so I would make fit from your prespective. The market's pretty competitve for that type of site and there's no point throwing a lot of money at it until you get some useful metrics for your site IMO.
The short answer is: it doesn't matter, unless the site is going to do something so amazingly different that one technology is obviously better suited. And I can't think of anything like that off the top of my head.
A big red flag is: if your friend is concerned about the extra $5/month for asp.net hosting instead of LAMP hosting, then you're probably not going to get paid. Ever.
Caveats aside, be realistic: what is the immediate goal? To get something working, or to design something on the scale of plentyoffish.com or facebook.com? [Facebook.com has about 44,000 servers at the moment]
So, what are the chances of your friend's dating web site exploding to the size where scaling is a concern? For most sites, the answer is "very close to zero" - because of the marketing effort required to drive that much traffic.
Now, what is the revenue stream? Is there any expectation that you will get paid to do this? Do you think the site will be profitable? Is the project fully funded?
Friendship is great, but don't let that keep you from asking the appropriate business and client-relationship questions. One sure way to ruin a friendship is to do some work for free and/or without thinking through the full extent of the project. Far too often, you think it is a one-time favor, while they think it is your job!
LAMP is only cheaper until you read the fine print. It's not better or worse technically, just different.
The WebsiteSpark/BizSpark programs will get you all the Microsoft software you need to get started, free for three years. If price is her driving concern, point her to those programs if she's willing to consider the ASP.NET platform.
Hosting will cost a fair amount either way, because for a full-service website you don't want to go shared. You'll need at least one dedicated server to support a dating site. The OS and database will be free either way if you go with one of the *Spark programs I mentioned.
As a small startup company you can get a free 3-year MSDN subscription (well, you have to pay $100 at the end of the 3 years). If you think .Net will be more efficient and this website will make money, seriously consider BizSpark.
Since you are looking for dating site, check out Markus Frind of plentyoffish.com he is running the largest dating site on .net platform with asp.net and sql.
Related
My company has a control panel website written in ASP.NET. We run an online service used by over 20,000 users worldwide, mostly from the US, Japan and several European countries. It is used mostly by business users.
We face many problems using ASP.NET and development times are lengthy. I played around a bit with Flex and I can see why it would cut down development times however I am afraid we would not be able to support browsers that do not have flash installed. Considering the fact that many of our customers are business users in companies that might not allow to install flash.
Your opinion and suggestions will be appreciated.
This isn't really a programming question, it is a commercial question for your product management and marketing people. Flex requires Flash as you are aware, so the answer is to find out the degree to which Flash is supported in your customer base - and the version. Start with your biggest and highest profile customer. If you can't get away with it there it is a non-starter.
I am pretty sure that your feature set will be better as well as your development time if you use Flash/Flex for your control panel, so from that standpoint I would strongly advocate it. You may also be able to influence your customers' environments if you are adding highly valuable features, so the objection may disappear if the value is high enough.
However the value has to be quite high for people to contemplate such a change to their working environment. This is especially true in environments who feel that Flash is a risk and have removed it because they tend to be paranoid about software on the desktop. Shorter development times is not a good argument for anyone on the commercial side of the house when faced with such trade-offs, so beware of forwarding that in a customer context as a compelling argument - it isn't.
HTH and good luck - I hope you manage to switch over, you will have a huge amount of flexibility and sizzle added to your apps.
In your current ASP control panel you should put in a small flash script to see how many users can access it, if all or most users can access it then then it shouldn't be a problem to use flex. Over all most users have flash and it shouldn't be a problem.
Apologies for this huge question.....please bear with me and try to help :)
Previous employers have all had in house hosting or people other than me to deal with that side of stuff and all my personal projects (ie low traffic) have been comfortably handled by servergrid.com who allow any number of domains even in their basic package.
I am about to take on more serious projects and have little clue about hosting, the questions to ask and what to look for. Some basic research has been done but I am honestly confused by the number of metrics involved when main thing i care about is SPEED & SCALING.
I have noticed that servergrid db servers for instance shares many 100s DB users/server so I imagine a shared package where your paying just 2$/month for sql server, tho a bargain, is not going to scale beyond a hobby site.
So:
is moving to a dedicated or virtual dedicated server the simple answer to speed and the only real metric I need to worry about?
dedicated pricing is a big jump on servergrid - are there premium shared services that don't put a bazillion people on the server - it doesn't seem obvious from the sites, would it make a huge difference?
the landscape seems to changing in a big way - IIS7 and Server 2008 seem to have all these
features like Isolated Application Pools/ Hyper V, are these just BS hype or things that seriously help with scaling and speed?
Lastly cloud hosting (specifically http://www.rackspacecloud.com) - it runs .NET right, is it fundamentally architecturally different to anything else or just use of the word cloud for marketing? It looks v cool - but is it just normal hosting with a different billing model and a somewhat easier way to scale? Is this similar to the much hyped squarespace hosted blog/site system?
Sorry for my rambling style of question and would be deeply grateful for someone who can just in relatively plain english sweep away some of my basic misconceptions....
Thanks!
Okay, take a look at Amazon Web Services. They are very flexible in terms of infrastructure (both hardware and software) and I find their rates to be ok. Also, their business model revolves around "using" not "leasing" (ie you pay based on what you use, for how long, etc).
I think it's a good starting point.
Since your main concern is "speed" & "scale" you may also take a look at Windows Azure and SQL Azure
Windows Azure
A nice brief video explanation by Steve Marx.
What is Windows Azure
I would stay away from shared hosting for a "more serious" production deployment. Amazon's AWS is as good a place to start as any (rackspace has a similar service which now supports self-provisioning). Failing that, you might carefully evaluate how much scale you really need. If you know how many users you'll have and have any idea what their usage patterns will be, then get dedicated hosting to fit. If the number of your users is unknown and unpredictable, and their usage will be spiky, then go with AWS.
That would be my first-pass approach. YMMV, and it will take time to fine-tune your own approach.
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One thing that I keep hearing in reference to ASP.NET and MSFT technologies is that they cost money to use. Often when they are being compared to open source languages someone will mention that one factor in favor of open source is that it's free (to an extent). My question is, when does ASP.NET actually cost money to use in terms of using the proprietary technology?
Understandably there are the hosting fees, but I'm curious about the fees outside of these hosting fees. I'm especially curious about this as it relates one-person smaller-site development (non-team/large enterprise). Any help is appreciated.
(edits)
Some excellent answers. Much appreciated
The projects that I'm looking to use the technologies for would be personal sites and very small business sites (1 or 2). The intent would of course be that these projects get much bigger. It seems that for commercial production, fees will apply. What about just basic dynamic "shared hosting" sites that provide information?
You have to measure many things when you determine cost. We recently went through an evaluation of platform choice by an outside vendor, and the recommendation is that we stay with a Microsoft.NET platform. Why? For us, the reason is that once you get to an enterprise-level product suite, the difference is not as big as people would like you to believe.
Purchasing Microsoft products is a sound choice. The initial cost might seem high, but keep in mind if you get Software Assurance on your purchase (Visual Studio, for example) you are entitled to free upgrades as long as you keep you SA current - and it is at a fraction of the cost of a repurchase. Many people think you need to buy the full retail version every time, and that is just not true. Work with a larger vendor, like CDW, to help with licensing questions. They got someone from Microsoft's Licensing Division on the phone with us and helped us choose what was right. Not high-pressured at all. They actually talked us down on some of the things we thought we needed.
MSDN subscriptions are great. I have one through my employer, but also used to maintain one personally. If you are a contractor/self-employed, it is an operational expense. Like buying full products, renewing a MSDN subscription is very inexpensive compared to a purchase, and especially considering what you get. The licensing within MSDN is rather generous, and since you are a one-person shop, if I read that correctly, one MSDN is more than enough for your non-production needs. Plus, the bundled Support Incidents are a nice plus, as well.
There are many versions of Visual Studio, from the Express Editions all the way up to the Team Editions. For example, we are rolling out Team Foundation Server right now, so our costs are obviously higher. For a startup or small shop, there are TFS hosting partners and you can get Team Explorer for free. Or you can mix and match, using Visual Studio for development and something like VSS, SVN, or countless other version control products out there.
Just because someone "goes open source", that does not mean that it is free. Yes, the platform choice might be free, and the tools might be free, but there is a definite chance that you will need a commercial library or component some day. Plus, nothing prevents you from going with Open Source products with Microsoft, either. There are many open source projects written in .NET that can be leveraged with your solutions, and Microsoft is becoming a lot more transparent. We are working on a very large, enterprise solution right now and we are using only one "commercial" product, outside of our development tooling. There is a lot of Open Source usage, and a lot of implementations cobbled from community musings and examples.
The one thing that often goes unmentioned is the human cost that goes into these decisions. Microsoft is hated by many and their solutions might not be the fastest or most robust (although I will take IIS7 on W2K8 over any other web server configuration any day) they are focusing on making people more productive at what they can do. You aren't just buying products with them, you are actually buying productivity. As someone who has worked in a few Open Source shops, I am very appreciative of all the things that they have gotten right and understand that free does not always mean better.
I have a "one-person" side business and I really recommend looking into an MSDN subscription. It will give you access to tools and technologies that you would not otherwise be able to get your hands on without going a la carte in a retail route. Talk with someone, like a CDW, to help you figure out your licensing needs. If it works out, definitely try that route. You can cover all your in-house needs in a one person shop with an MSDN subscription, most likely (for example, a lot of the products are available to install to you (as a user) up to ten times as long as the machines that they are installed on are "yours" and non-production. There are exceptions to that, but not many.)
If that does not work, try the free route. You can definitely use Mono for .NET Development, as well as the Express Editions. I know a few C# developers who swear by Mono and could not be happier.
Best of luck to you!
Often when they are being compared to open source languages someone will mention that one factor in favor of open source is that it's free (to an extent). My question is, when does ASP.NET actually cost money to use in terms of using the proprietary technology?
Usually when people refer to "cost" in the way you described, they're implicitly referring to TCO, or total cost of ownership. The cost is not an explicit cost in that you've paid for something directly, but rather the long-term price of using something over its lifetime.
For example, even if a particular proprietary technology is free, it may be more difficult to hire and find people who know about it to work on your project. Consequently, if it is less popular than some open-source equivalent, you may wind up paying more for the same amount of labor because appropriately talented staff will be harder to find and in higher demand.
Conversely, if an open-source product is free but has low mindshare or performs poorly, it may well be worth it to pay for an expensive, closed-source proprietary solution rather than having to learn the idiosyncracies of the open-source version.
Naturally, there is some controversy surrounding just how to measure TCO, with both camps having some valid points.
.NET is free
C# compilers are free
Certain versions of Visual Studio are free, and you don't actually need it to write for .NET anyway (though it really, really helps!)
There are many free online resources for learning .NET, such as http://asp.net
In short, there's no real cost to using ASP.NET other than the hosting fee of the website or options you might buy to make things easier (better versions of Visual Studio.)
There's more of an ideological divide, with open source guys on one side being pretty anti-microsoft and so claiming it's high cost to use. I wouldn't worry about them. ;)
There are a couple of good answers already, but I'd like to add "it depends".
joseph.ferris obviously works in a large organization, where the cost of switching platforms is going to be very, very expensive, so the cost of paying the licensing costs is much less that the cost of switching. Take a look at Jonathan Schwartz's blog entry for Mar. 11, especially the section titled "When Free is too Expensive" for another reason to go with fully-supported infrastructure.
But consider a couple of other scenarios.
First, there's the hobbyist, which is what you seem to be addressing - you want to play around with the technology, and maybe put up a website or three. There aren't any issues with privacy or scalability, so you can deploy your application on an inexpensive shared hosting solution. In this case, costs are pretty much irrelevant - whatever platform you pick, you can get free tools to get you started. Remember kids, the first hit is always free.
For a startup, things are a bit different. If the goal is to build a large website, the potential licensing costs can be daunting - it's probably going to a lot cheaper to go with open source. In addition to the production environment, you need to pay for development environments, testing, etc. Even for a small company, licenses may be more than they have in the budget - a single Windows 2003 server Enterprise license lists for $4k. If you're trying to break into a competitive environment and compete on price, this alone may make you uncompetitive. I have seen situations where a Windows-based solution (server, database, and custom development coupled with a content management system) is two or three times the price of an open source solution.
I know that it has been answered, but I will put my 2 cents. Why are you wondering about the cost of ASP.net? In my opinion, the choice of technology in your case (1-2 ppl development freelancer team) should be governed by technology familiarity. If you are an ASP.net expert, the expense of buying the products and MSDN subscription is well-worth it, because it's your primary language of choice that you know well, hence the projects that you implement, will be done better and faster, so it makes sense to stay with it.
However, if you happen to know another technology just as well and you are comfortable that you can deliver a robust product on-time with it, it may be worth it to go low cost. As a contractor, the main objective is to not lose time/money hence you pick a technology that balances your expenses and time spent learning it. In other words, if you are a Java expert, there is no point of paying for asp.net. If you know asp,net well already, then sure, stay with it.
The clients rarely care whether you used Ruby, PHP, Python, Java or ASP.net. They care about time lines, their cost and quality.
I find that it does not cost much money to use. It does infact cost a pretty penny to get windows based hosting. Visual studio is also expensive. After those, though, not many expenses are encountered.
If you want to use the more professional versions of Visual Studio to develop your applications: you will need to pay for that.
Also, there are a lot of commercial components available on the market. These will save you time or improve your product, but at a cost.
For open source, there are also a lot of components, but in this scene most is free/open.
I am the .Net specialist in a consultancy with many difference flavors of developers using many different languages and frameworks. Because everyone is pretty much trying to push their own agendas with our different clients in terms of what technology to propose, I'm constantly finding myself in the classic arguments with them all about "why" .Net may be a better technology solution for a given clients requirements.
Often time here, the debate comes down to the issue of performance. Usually the areas that are argued about here consist of costs, maintainability, and performance. I have a hard time arguing about cost because in general open-source technologies are usually cheaper, and although and can usual put a good word in for .Net in terms of total cost of ownership (It seems to be pretty easy to convince people that .Net applications have relative low costs for maintainability if the application architecture has been thoughtfully designed), we will really only push .Net here if the client understands and is indifferent about the costs associated with Microsoft licensing. In terms of maintainability, like I mentioned before, the other developers here realize how much a difference it can make when an application is thoughtfully designed. I have had around 8 years of experience programming .Net solutions and I'm pretty confident in my ability to present to a client all the features and tool sets that .Net provides to give an application a long, and easy to maintain life span.
So again, what it usually boils down to is an argument over performance. Up until now, I have worked for companies that already used Microsoft development technologies to developer their applications so while I have discussed performance with others in the past I have never been a position where I have had to convince performance. My other co-workers are always boasting about these different website that they go to that show improved performance for open-source web applications. This all being said, what I would like to know from everybody here is where do you usually go to get your information about how may some .Net web applications have out performed other technologies?
Thanks in advance for the advice,
-Matt
I appreciate the detail, though I must say I forgot your question at the end. =)
Anyhow, this is something that has certainly been on my mind in the past. There is always a conflict on what technology is the best. We all know on each side you will find zealots, so it's quite difficult weeding out the facts. Professionally, I've seen successes/disasters on both sides of the fence.
For you, since you have a vested interest in .NET. I would showcase success stories, such as ... (insert whatever big name site you want) Facebook, SO, etc. I'd also find stories where things went wrong on the .NET side and pinpoint the reason. Like you said, it is often poor implementation. I don't know how many DailyWTF stories I've seen with ASP.NET sites behaving poorly but it gets traced back to 1) Poor design 2) Implementation 3) Coding.
Once you have a solid show case to justify the technology you can then of course talk about your own past experiences. You need to qualify yourself as being able to avoid the same pitfalls that your stories exposed.
.NET loses in performance against C/C++. In general, it will win over Python, Ruby, and PHP in baseline performance. The static typing tends translates into faster native code. (There are exceptions, such as Python's hand-tweaked set() performance being faster than HashSets in .NET)
The difference might come down to things like apache vs IIS (and their respective caching configurations), database architecture, etc. Features than can be misused or misunderstood (ViewStates and large GridViews, or using large numbers of hidden WebControls, for example)
Depending on what type of application you are building I've found that performance is rarely an issue. All the technologies out there can perform well enough.
When debating .net versus java/ruby/python etc I usually try to point out other benefits of .net.
There was this one time my boss asked me why .net instead of others? He wanted to know because he could get a PHP programmer for cheap. As part of the report we wrote a simple web application in 4 different languages and the .net app ran the fastest by far. After that we solidified behind .net. This was when .net was new so none of us really knew it well. We came from ASP, PHP, Coldfusion and Java backgrounds.
If you are looking for .Net performance stories you can listen to this dot net rocks show
I am curious as to what others are using in this situation. I know a couple of the options that are out there like a memcached port or ScaleOutSoftware. The memcached ports don't seem to be actively worked on (correct me if I'm wrong). ScaleOutSoftware is too expensive for me (I don't doubt it is worth it). This is not to say that I don't want to hear about people using memcached or ScaleOutSoftware. I'm just stating what I "know" at this point.
So my question is basically this: for those of you ACTIVELY using distributed caching, what are you using, are you happy with it, and what should I look out for?
I am moving to two servers very soon...both will be at the same location. I use caching fairly heavily (but carefully) to reduce the load on my database server.
Edit: I downloaded Scaleout Software's solution. I've coded for it and it seems to work real well. I just have to decide if my wallet will part with the cash for it. :) Anyone have experiences good or bad with ScaleoutSoftware?
Edit Again: It's been a little while since I asked this? Any more thoughts on it? We ended up buying the solution from ScaleOutSoftware and have been happy with it, but I'm curious what others are doing.
Microsoft has a product pending code-named Velocity. It's still in CTP, and is moving slowly, but looks like it will be pretty good. We'll be beating it up in the near future to see how it handles what we want it to do (> 2 million read/writes per hour). Will post back with results.
There is a 100% native .NET, well documented open source (LGPL) project called Shared Cache. Looks like it is not yet mentioned on SO, but it's promising and should be able to do what most people expect from a distributed cache. It even supports different strategies like distributed or replicated caching etc.
I will update this post with more details as soon as I had a chance to try it on a real project.
We're currently using an incredibly simple cache that I wrote in a couple of hours, based on re-hosting the ASP.NET cache in a Windows Service (more info and source code here). I won't pretend it's anywhere near as optimised as something like Memcached but we were just looking for something simple and free until Velocity came along, and it's held up extremely well even under fairly heavy load.
It comes down to our personal preference for core components - i.e. ones that affect whether the site is available or not - that they are either (a) supported by a vendor with a history of rapid and high quality support, or (b) written by us so that if something goes wrong we can fix it quickly. Open source is all well and good, and indeed we do use some OSS, but if your site is offline then unfortunately newsgroups et al don't have a 1 hour SLA, and just because it's OSS doesn't mean you have the necessary understanding or ability to fix it yourself.
We are using the memcached port for Windows and we are very pleased with it. The enyim.com memcached client API is great and easy to work with. It's also open source, which is a big advantage, if you ask me.
We are now using this setup in a production web-app and it has helped a lot in improving its performance.
There's a great .NET wrapper/port found here on Codeplex. Awesomesauce!
We use memcached with the enyim library in a production environment (www.funda.nl). Works fine, very pleased with it, but we did notice a substantial raise in CPU use on the clients. Presumably due to the serializing/deserializing going on. We do around 1000 reads per second.
One tried and tested product by 100's of customers worldwide is NCache. Its
a feature rich product that lets you store session state in a redundant and highly available manner, lets you share data
within the enterprise as well as bridging for WAN communication essentially acting as a data fabric and lastly it lets you build an elastic caching tier so that when
your application scales, you can add servers to the cache and actually boost performance further.