Social networking platform

[ian]

Hi folks,
I'm a PHP veteran of many years and I'm soon starting to work for a startup company in the Midwest. This startup company is developing a social networking site in PHP. One of their development teams (outsourced) has now suggested they should port the code to ASP and Windows platform (from PHP on Unix currently). They've asked me what I think of this proposal.

Now, I have around half a decade of experience with PHP, but no experience in ASP. I've done some reading and understand the differences between PHP and ASP now I think. One place said that ASP is the preferred language for eCommerce applications, for whatever reason. Can anybody tell me more about this and tell me if PHP is the right choice for this kind of project or if ASP is a better choice, disregarding that code already exists?

Here's my rationale for suggesting PHP over ASP - please feel free to correct me or to add things:
1. Lots of folks know PHP, help is readily available everywhere - PHP is an open platform
2. PHP is free - ASP requires MS licenses
3. PHP works with a variety of databases easily - ASP only(?) with MS-SQL which must be licensed
4. PHP runs on Unix systems as well as Windows systems naturally - ASP only on Windows servers (or Linux with third party integration, for whatever that is worth)
5. Unix systems are free, Windows systems aren't. Unix servers tends to be safer than Windows-based servers (depending on lots of factors though)
6. PHP tends to run faster, as ASP is built on COM; PHP uses it's own memory

Am I way off? Comments? Is PHP indeed the better choice for this project? Questions?

[David Bowley]

PHP has a lot more support around in the internet in the form of tutorials and forums etc. If you know PHP why bother learning ASP?