The most popular combination for the web is by far PHP and MySQL. Mostly used for small websites and open source systems (phpNuke, phpBB, WordPress) it can also be found among large players, and the best example of that is Yahoo! (at least when it comes to PHP.) For someone who learns quickly and has some programming background, PHP and MySQL is the type of language you could learn in a weekend, and develop a full blown website from gound up the next week. Because of the open source movement (which probably manifested the greatest with PHP) you have hundreds of thousands of already developed PHP scripts on the web, the great majority being free. The successful ones are constantly being updated (with bug fixes, new features) frequently by developers from all over the web. However, even if the code might be free, not all code is free for you to use in a commercial environment, so you won't always be capable of using the code you want inside a corporation or for creating a derived commercial version of it. Usually when code can be popular in the business environment, commercial versions are being created by the authors at very affordable costs.

Because the licensing costs are most of the time a clean $0, webhosting prices for PHP and MySQL websites are more often that not, ridiculously low. They start from a little over $2 a month, which includes an unlimited number of MySQL databases, bandwidth and plenty of storage capacity. On the other hand, Unix systems typically need more administration time because updates are not automatically installed like on Windows Servers, sometimes they even involve the recompilation of the kernel, which is definitely something that you wouldn't want to do if you don't have any knowledge of Unix systems and/or Linux. Even restarting the server can prove to be a challenge in a server not running a graphic interface. The conclusion here is that unless you have good Unix skills and time, you should be purchasing managed webhosting, and fortunately most of the webhost plans out there are for managed servers. In a corporate environment where remote servers are not an option, you will surely want to get yourself a system administrator; they usually come for an affordable monthly cost and read your email when they have nothing better to do.

The complexity of PHP and MySQL is quite low, and most freelance programmers out there use this combination for implementing web solutions. What does this mean for you? Cheap coders, as cheap as $10 / hour when the code is from Eastern Europe or India. Obviously cheap coders come at a cost and in this case it is reliability: it is almost a habit that more coders than not will miss the original deadline or fail to deliver what they promised. This is because most PHP and MySQL developers learn programming by picking up knowledge from tutorials all over the web. In some cases this can be good because the programmer has a hands-on experience, however this also means he learns the quick and dirty way of doing things instead of the proper way. And here we arrived at what is probably the biggest disadvantage of PHP development: it doesn't enforce object-oriented programming and it doesn't separate your code from the markup (unless you use a 3rd party template engine) possibly making a large project a nightmare to handle. Another disadvantage that is noticeable in large project is the failure to protect the source code, since it doesn't get compiled like ASP.NET does and thus you have to upload all the source code at the place where the website is ran from. Thus this raises issues in terms of security, redistribution of the code and efficiency. And despite what you may hear on the web from Linux advocates, the Linux servers are commonly hacked into (hence the constant patches) and PHP code can very easily be exploited by a hacker mainly through SQL injection attacks that could reveal all the data in your database or simply delete it.

So far we've seen how PHP and MySQL hosted on a Linux server will cost you nothing, it will allow for rapid development and cheap development cost. The disadvantage is that big projects can easily turn into nightmares to maintain and secure, and even smaller projects not developed properly could need redevelopment only two years later. Hopefully from this article and the one that takes you through ASP.NET and SQL Server, you now have a good understanding of when one is better over the other.

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