My baby-name site started life on ASP.NET with a MSSQL backend. It worked. The reason I rewrote the whole thing in PHP + MySQL had nothing to do with the code being bad — it was everything around the code.
This is the migration writeup: why I left a stack that was technically fine, the MSSQL → MySQL gotchas that actually cost me time (the worst one was thematically perfect for a names site), and what the new stack let me build that the old one was quietly blocking.
The real reason: hosting, not code
ASP.NET is a perfectly good framework. The problem is its habitat. For a solo dev shipping small sites:
Windows hosting is scarce and pricier. The cheap, plentiful end of the hosting market is overwhelmingly Linux/LAMP. Windows + IIS plans are fewer, cost more, and the budget ones I could find were the least stable.
