Honest question: what's surprising about .net and asp?

I usually see this view explained that due to the .Net stack's higher up front cost than free alternatives, and (debatably) higher long term cost, it's an uncommon choice for startups.

Basically, deploying a .Net site requires at minimum 1 personal license of Windows and 1 server license of Windows. Sometimes a non-free copy of Visual Studio, and usually a license for SQL Server (since many MS people use the whole stack for integration reasons). Without buying hardware, Windows hosting is also always more expensive.

Compared to a LAMP/Rails/Django style app which you could theoretically get off the ground for the hardware cost of a local PC and cheap VPS hosting.

Of course developer familiarity, your local hiring pool, initial launch scale, business partners, vendor integration, etc, etc, etc, all influence the tech choice and its impact on cost.

You're absolutely right about the costs of running real iron - Windows adds $1,000 per machine. But Windows virtual machines cost the same as Linux: about $20/mo for a lowend VPS. Plus the code is compiled and tends to run more efficiently than Ruby for instance. :-)

If you are awesome and outgrow that VPS with some paying customers, then I think you can swing the $1,000 on a windows license.

I really hate being a shill for MS...

>Plus the code is compiled and tends to run more efficiently than Ruby for instance. :-)

Those words don't mean what you think it means. You're right that most CLR code will be faster than equivalently idiomatic Ruby code that accomplishes the same task, but the reasons for it have nothing to do with compilation.

Regarding costs and licensing, have you heard of AppHarbor (http://appharbor.com). It's like Heroku but for .Net, free (at least right now) for small web apps and has SQL Server and MySQL database options.

Also, I've heard mention of BizSpark which kind of defers your costs but I haven't got any hard evidence that it is still a good option for startups.

There's no upfront licensing cost due to Microsoft BizSpark.

I can think of a few practical reasons why (I can think of non-practical ones too, but I assume that's not what you're after :)

1. .Net and Asp have not insignificant upfront costs when compared to a stack based on Ruby, PHP, or practically anything else.

2. You're basically tied to Windows application servers. There really isn't much of an option to move to another OS (whether because you've changed hosts, or you want something more stripped down or leaner, or you've found a valuable library that's only available on a BSD or something).

3. ASP (even with .Net) presents a pretty rigid framework for application development (though I'm sure there's ways around it). If what you're after is MS's take on MVC, that's probably fine, but if you're looking to push boundaries, you might want to think about a more piecemeal approach.

#3: I've messed around with .NET WebMethods a bit. They allow me to go completely around the rigidness of ASP when I need to and they can stay inside the same C# backing code for the page.

would appreciate if you could tell me any other problems your ran into! I'm keen on any feedback. genystartup@gmail. cheers!