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Comment by redstripe | Hacker News Reader

This article is pretty short on costing details. Silverlight encoding aside (because that's competely unrelated to asp.net mvc deployment) you can deploy web sites really cheap on the microsoft stack.

Windows Web Server: $400 SQL Server Express: Free (Databases have a 4 GB maximum size)

I can't image how it would cost them 5 figures to use asp.net mvc. I find the productivity of the MS development stack to be well worth the meager cost.

Take stackoverflow.com - a hugely successful site that I believe runs off 3 servers (originally 1). Jeff and Joel put this together on a pretty tight budget and I bet their site handles a bigger workload than the OP's site.

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Look a few comments up - also (from MS themselves) running a site on SQL Express is not a good idea. I would never do that. Once you leave express, you need to license (for the web) by the cpu - which means you're about to cough up a lung.

Ask Jeff and Joel how much they're going to owe - I think it's almost to 6 figures :).

To be fair, Jeff and Joel are still on Bizspark. StackOverflow is ~2 years old.

And after 3 years if they need to spend 10k on licensing for a very successful site that will be peanuts compared to their own time spent. Or do they value that at nothing?

I think this is a bad article/interview because it gives the impression that you can't do websites in asp.net MVC on the cheap.

You are assuming that we would spend more time using RoR then ASP.NET, we have found this to be the opposite. We build out and deploy features in much less time then we would on ASP.NET now.

Not sure if this is feasible, but it would be great to post your ASP.NET vs RoR code to compare the delta.

When is $10,000 peanuts? Seriously - I'd rather bonus a developer that money then hand it over for something I can get for free.

I think the point is $1 is too much money if the tools aren't the best. But $10k is not a lot of money if the tools are great. I tell my team, if you find a tool that makes you more productive, buy it. There's almost no reasonably priced tool that wouldn't be worth it if the dev thought it was.

We budget around $10k per dev for tools and training per year. We usually come in a fair bit under, but given we spend over $200k/year per dev, this is a small fraction of their cost.

I think your point is that the tools weren't the right fit. Because if they were, it seems like baulking at $10k is a sign that you can't make the right cost-beneift tradeoff -- which is a very bad sign for a company.

Actually, with 2008 R2 the SQL Express limited has been raised to 10GB.

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