online venture - technology considerations

grahamor

Hi,

I have an idea for doing something quite original online. The site would rely heavily on database tables, queries etc. as well as lots of coding and using some AJAX functionality.

I come from an ASP background but would i be better going down the LAMP road as there are no crazy licence costs and all that jazz ?

I want to keep costs to a minimum while starting out so i think LAMP would be a much better choice.

What about security considerations ? if there was lots of user info stored , is mySQL secure enough?

Any pointers or advice would be great

Thanks

misterq

Yes there are licensing savings going down the LAMP route, but you should weigh them up against the cost of learning a new technology set against that if ASP is what you know best.

Your question about security considerations is a bit vague. MySQL is a data storage system, no different to MSSQL. It is as secure as you make it.
There are plenty of major websites and corporations using it.

Mr. Magoo

I can't imagine that there would be that much of an overhead for licenses if you use ASP, depending on your hosting provider it will probably all be included in your hosting package. Normally I would definitly say LAMP is the way to go for a project like this but stick with what you know although that said if you are good at ASP then you should have no problems picking up PHP pretty quickly. MySQL is secure enough to use, generally the security weakness will be in your application or configuration but you always have the option of other free databases such as Oracle XE

rsynnott

FWIW, Google Adwords uses MySQL. In practice, security concerns will revolve around your code and your provider's/your database setup.