I have an unpaid internship for a very new startup company with little tech experience that’s trying to be a Groupon clone. They’re currently using WordPress and I’ve been trying to decide what web framework to push them towards, since I’ll have to learn that language and implement it as well.
Is ASP.Net MVC a realistic option for a web based startup company with little financial backing? For example, I know in the Rails hosting is slightly cheaper because of the whole free OS thing and there are free “gems” available to do things like a mailers, but how much more expensive can it get if I go with ASP.Net MVC since such add-ons stop being open source?
How much does the cost of hosting for .NET applications add to the equation?
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Not a whole lot. The people to program things, and the people to manage the infrastructure are a few orders of magnitude more expensive than any hosting cost issues you can run across. There are plenty of free “gems” — check out nuget for .NET’s version of that. Cloud-wise, both EC2 and Azure offer windows boxes so you aren’t stuck owning hardware.
The one place it probably could get more expensive is in developer tools — most of the OS stuff has a few FOSS tools of choice, whereas with .NET good most tools are not free. While you can get MSDN Ultimate subscriptions for all your developers, free for three years (check out bizspark), you will have to pay for that stuff after the initial three-year period. And there are some necessary ancillary tools such as resharper. TeamCity is an awesome build server but it isn’t free either. You get the idea.
See StackOverflow for a huge Q&A community with lots of .NET devs. It is a very well documented, well supported platform.
Personally, I would avoid startups with shaky backing these days, but even in that case one could make headway with ASP.NET. The game is about Minimum Viable Product and .NET can get you there just as well as rails with the right team.
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If I can be quite honest here, I was in the same situation you’re in. I wanted to host a Rails applications because I was under the impression that it was cheaper to host. After all, it’s Open Source right?
Not the case.
In fact, almost every Rails project has to be run on a high-tier hosting such as Heroku (initial costs about 39$), because if you run it on a shared environment you are bound to find trouble with incompatibilities.
What is the .NET alternative? Well, it’s the same price and some cases even cheaper. Take for example Softsys Hosting’s Eco 1 Package – it costs 15$/month and you get all those specs. More than enough for starting and you receive a full on stack.
As you can see, empirically, cost is not that different.
- Visual Studio? Free.
- Entity Framework? Free.
- SQL Server? Free (for starter needs)
I have launched three websites already using full on Microsoft .NET stacks and have not paid a dime for “licensing fees” just hosting fees.
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In .Net land, it is not that hard to create decent product using open source only (just browse nuget.org). Switch MsSql with Postgre, entity framework with nhibernate, unity with structuremap, mstest with xunit. You can even switch asp.net-mvc with fubumvc or even nancy if you want more lightweight option.
But I would recommend you to use ruby on rails. Ecosystem around it is much larger and I find ruby being less verbose and more pleasant to work with language than c#.
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