Doug Ross @ Journal

FellowshipChurch.com: Why the Switch?

Picture credit: http://www.infocom.com
Terry Storch and Brian Bailey have operated FellowshipChurch.com, a full-fledged church management portal site, since 2001. In 2002, the site was overhauled using Microsoft's snazzy, new .NET tools: IIS, C#, ASP.NET and, of course, MS SQL Server.

By 2004, a confluence of factors caused the development team to re-evaluate their approach. Separate campuses; the maintenance burden entailed by management of additional web properties (FellowshipConnection and EdYoung.org among them); and a relatively small development team were all factors.

As the sites scaled, it became clear to the development team that continuing down the .NET path was probably not wise.

...In addition to our three in-house sites, we have a fourth that is developed by a local company in PHP using Linux and PostgreSQL. Time after time, they have been able to deliver simple and quick solutions that would take us twice as long in our current environment...

Brian blogged about the decision to move to LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL [or Postgres] and PHP [or Perl]). He characterizes the top ten factors:

   1) Developers
   2) Complexity and speed of development
   3) Cost
   4) Get it running/keep it running
   5) Security/viruses
   6) Platform independence
   7) Community
   8) Examples
   9) Browsers
   10) The new guy

Read the whole thing.

As an aside, I'm an advocate for Visual Studio, ASP.NET, C# and MS SQL Server if you're certain you're tied in to Microsoft's server platforms. But if you look to the big boys to see their strategic direction -- say, Google's clustered Linux farm or Yahoo's adoption of PHP --the appeal and security of platform independence is undeniable.

Brian Bailey: Why the Switch?