.NET vs. PHP, which technology to choose for website

Any enterpreneur who is interested in getting a website designed for informing about his services or for selling his goods on an e-commerce website, often faces a dilemma about which technology to choose for website.

Dark Side of Arguments:
The dilemma is most of the webdesigners plead for PHP, not becaue it is the best web designing technology but because most of them use it for following reasons:

• PHP is an old technology and old webdesigners have got used to it.
• Old webdesigners are afraid to lose their business if new technology namely ASP.NET gets popularity.
• Servers for PHP are cheaper and old designers are afraid to lose their profit if they have to give website on ASP.NET for the same competitive prices.

For these reasons they make a false pretence that PHP is better technology and some of them even go to the extent of arguing that ASP.NET is a technology that should be discarded. It speaks of their fear rather than the merits of technology.

Real Spectrum - ASP.NET Vs. PHP:  
Reality if webdesigning is far from what is commonly given to be understood by webdesigner with vested interests. The facts are as follows:

1. PHP stands for 'Personal Home Page'. As the name signifies, it started as a personal website effort. Early PHP was not intended to be a new programming language. One criticism of PHP is that it was not originally designed, but instead it was developed organically; among other things, this has led to inconsistent naming of functions and inconsistent ordering of their parameters. In some cases, the function names were chosen to match the lower-level libraries which PHP was "wrapping", while in some very early versions of PHP the length of the function names was used internally as a hash function, so names were chosen to improve the distribution of hash values. For more details refer to history.
2. ASP.NET stands for Active Server Pages .NET and is developed by Microsoft. ASP.NET is used to create web pages and web technologies and is an integral part of Microsoft's .NET framework vision. As a member of the .NET framework, ASP.NET is a very valuable tool for programmers and developers as it allows them to build dynamic, rich web sites and web applications using compiled languages like VB and C#. ASP.NET starts where PHP ends. For more details see the chronology of development of ASP.NET
3. PHP codes are mixed with html codes, which is primarily a language of static websites where as ASP.NET was, from the beginning, deveoped as an open source server-side Web application framework designed for Web development to produce dynamic Web pages.
4. Being an integral part of Microsoft, the development of ASP.NET has seen a much faster pace than PHP.
5. ASP.NET is not limited to script languages, it allows you to make use of .NET languages like C#, J#, VB, etc. It allows developers to build very compelling applications by making use of Visual Studio, the development tool provided by Microsoft. Opposed to this, no written specification or standard exists for the PHP language, leaving the canonical PHP interpreter as a de facto standard. Recently (in 2014) some effort was initiated for creating a formal PHP specification.
6. ASP.NET drastically reduces the amount of code required to build large applications. Consequently the chances of accident are remote.
7. With built-in Windows authentication and per-application configuration, your applications are safe and secured.
8. It provides better performance by taking advantage of early binding, just-in-time compilation, native optimization, and caching services right out of the box.
9. Provides simplicity as ASP.NET makes it easy to perform common tasks, from simple form submission and client authentication to deployment and site configuration.
10. It is purely server-side technology so, ASP.NET code executes on the server before it is sent to the browser.
11. ASP.NET makes for easy deployment. There is no need to register components because the configuration information is built-in.
12. The Web server continuously monitors the pages, components and applications running on it. If it notices any memory leaks, infinite loops, other illegal activities, it immediately destroys those activities and restarts itself.
13. Easily works with ADO.NET using data-binding and page formatting features. It is an application which runs faster and counters large volumes of users without having performance problems.
14. Whether you are building a small business web site or a large corporate web application distributed across multiple networks, ASP.NET will provide you all the features you could possibly need...and at an affordable cost
15. As the data and site are maintained seperately and linked for specific purposes only through Sql Server, it provides additional protection.

     Golden Rule:    
ASP.NET, the next generation version of Microsoft's ASP, is a programming framework used to create enterprise-class web sites, web applications, and technologies. To plead for discarding this technology is unwelcome move of creating hazards to the development in the field of web designing.

     Other suggested readings:    

History of PHP
Developments in ASP.NET
Six reasons to prefer ASP.NET over PHP
Multiple reasons to choose ASP.NET