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Comment by benologist | Hacker News Reader

MS is not a horrible stack to develop on. It performs great and for the most part you can avoid a lot of the licensing costs anyway - on dedicated servers the difference is like $10 or $20 if you're leasing, and if you're rolling your own hardware there's BizSpark.

SQL Server starts free and it was actually only halfway through last year that I stopped using the free version at Playtomic. It's also the only significantly expensive part - and very easy to not use in favor of something that is free/open source/cheaper/whatever.

I'm glad I went with .NET for my startup - a few days ago I calculated some current numbers: 29 million unique people logged over 3 billion events during a 10 day period. It's holding up well enough for me and my very lean, mostly Microsoft-flavored startup.

Yesterday I came across this writeup on what Quora is built on too:

http://www.philwhln.com/quoras-technology-examined

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The writeup on what Quora is built on say that, "Quora uses Ubuntu Linux as it’s OS of choice," and does not mention any Microsoft technologies at all.

The Quora link is just a look at how another Q&A site is built, not related other than their overlap in purpose.

Since the link is in a comment that begins, "MS is not a horrible stack to develop on," and ends, "I'm glad I went with .NET for my startup," a reader could get the impression that the link somehow provides support for your pro-MS position.

Good point, I moved it above the Quora link.

on dedicated servers the difference is like $10 or $20 if you're leasing, and if you're rolling your own hardware there's BizSpark.

How much does BizSpark cost after the initial pricing period lapses?

http://www.microsoft.com/BizSpark/Faqs.aspx#Startup-Question...

Startups may take advantage of the BizSpark Graduation offer that allows startups to keep the software they have with the option to purchase subscriptions and maintenance if they want to keep it up to date. This also allows them to continue using their Microsoft software at no cost in perpetuity and allows them to renew subscriptions to this software without paying any initial license fees. Startups can:

•Keep their MSDN Ultimate software and optionally renew their MSDN subscriptions at any level

•Keep all their Windows and SQL Servers they are using in production and optionally purchase the first two years of Software Assurance (updates and ongoing maintenance) at a 50% discount

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/somasegar/archive/2010/11/04/bizspar...

It's remarkably friendly although you could paint yourself into a corner if you went crazy with SQL Server, but there are a lot of options these days for dealing with large volumes of data.

At the end of 3 years the costs are hopefully going to be incidental.

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