PHP vs ASP for my new site - SEO benefits?

I'm getting a new site designed and have narrowed it down to 2 designers. the initial brief was for php.

I'm an old school designer and can only really work in HTML, but have a little knowledge of PHP.

the designer we like the most only works with .asp of which I know not much.

Some quick googling tells me there may be some speed issues with asp compared to php, can anyone back this up?

Also does anyone with knowledge of the 2 languages have any opinions relating to SEO, my current html site ranks really well and I don't want to lose that.

Another point is that my current host, which I have just paid another year of hosting and security cert, does not support asp, so I would also need to migrate the site to another host. i can use that hosting for another site so the money spent is not really an issue, but how would changing hosts affect my rankings at the same time as the site being changed.

Any well informed help would be appreciated.

Doesn't matter for SEO, but I don't know why someone would pick ASP for web development.

No difference for SEO because at the end of the day, both languages are still generating html.

I'd definitely go for PHP - universally supported, reasonably fast and stable, and most importantly Unix / Linux native. If you want to use asp or asp.net on Linux then you'll have to jump through hoops using sun java web server or mono. It's doable but requires extra pointless fucking around. You could use a microsoft OS on your web server, but that is highly not recommended if you want security and uptime. You would also have to pay MS licensing costs for your box.

Also there are tons more cheap and competent PHP web developers around than there are asp / asp.net.

The speed issues related to ASP.net some because there is actually two files to each page (And a tonne of binding), that mean there is alot of pre-parsing of the pages before the user even sees them. Far more than what you would get on a PHP site. However, given two pages with exactly the same content in ASP and PHP, you wouldn't be able to tell the two apart.

ASP.net is a good language for web. It depends on whether he is using Webforms or MVC really. IMO PHP is a much easier language to be sloppy with. That is, any idiot can whip up PHP pages and slap them together and it will work, but the code reads like shite. ASP.net isn't so easy and atleast requires a bit of thought and pre-planning.

Don't worry about hosting. Finding the proper developer is more important.

The speed issue, assuming they're using asp.net and not classic asp, is that asp will run rings around php. The reason is simply asp is compiled and php isn't, so especially with a larger site with many visitors, you'll be able to handle far more traffic with less equipment compared to a php site.

SEO wise there's really no difference other than the minimal ranking difference that speed makes.

pyronaut said:

The speed issues related to ASP.net some because there is actually two files to each page (And a tonne of binding), that mean there is alot of pre-parsing of the pages before the user even sees them.

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To clarify this a bit, the pre parsing (compiling) only happens ONCE for the first visitor to the site, which is your "slow" run and the server will use the compiled version after for much faster runs. PHP is more of a scripting language, so it runs the same middling speed each time.

With PHP you can manipulate the code and add various functions easier also it uses a Linux server

ASP uses a windows server less options for add on features.

PHP has my vote on a Linux server

wow - great replies guys and quick too. You've made me feel much better about the speed issue because I believe speed will be much more of a ranking factor in the near future.

korts said:

SEO wise there's really no difference other than the minimal ranking difference that speed makes.

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The speed difference when you're talking about serving a single page is infinitesimal compared to the overall overhead of the http transaction and especially the latency of your bandwidth.

You can also cache your bytecode in PHP if you really feel the need.

I'm mostly concerned with all the open source stuff, freely available libraries and code examples out there for PHP. Why go against that?

You're going to have an easier time finding PHP talent that asp.net talent. And there are a *lot* of open source PHP projects you can work with if that's an issue.

As has been mentioned already, the speed difference is negligible. I actually prefer .net once you get it configured correctly. But a linux / apache server will get a lot more out of a limited VPS server than will windows. The overhead for a Windows IIS server are just higher. And that usually means higher hosting costs (especially since hosting companies have to license windows from M$).

If you get into commercial libraries I've been much (much) more impressed with the 3rd-party (paid, not free) support for asp.net.

But for run-of-the-mill web stuff... the accessibility and cheap resource requirements of PHP are hard to beat.

I used to use WinHost for my asp.net stuff. Now I've moved almost everything over to Amazon's EC2 cloud.

if your hosting is using unix then php, if it using windows then asp. However if you can choose either hosting then go with unix and php. It is faster, especially at any DB related stuff. Dont get me wrong asp is quite good also but after using both extensively I have to say php is the better system to work with.

flaktrak said:

It is faster, especially at any DB related stuff.

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You mean coding wise or processing wise? Processing wise it has nothing to do with asp.net or PHP, it is the DB system you decide to use, MSSQL, Mysql, Postgres etc.