I plan on hiring a programmer to create me a custom website and I was wondering whether ASP.net was better than PHP. Some people describe PHP as "lower quality" but if this is true then why does Facebook use it?
PHP isn't lower quality. it tends to be easier to write in but it also normally takes a bit more code to do the same thing say in asp.net or cold fusion. Im a huge fan of both php and coldfusion. php is great because of the open source factors, speed, soooo many people know how to write it, its easy to write in and learn. Coldfusion has better performance factors in comparison to php, at least in test I have read online and in my own personal testing. ASP.net great to work with, fairly fast to develop but I will say php is much faster then asp.net. It may take more code to do the same thing in php but normally this allows a more robust solution with more options. If I had to choose I would do php all day long. Put it this way almost all the major sites in the world run on php, twitter, facebook, WIKIPEDIA!!, supposedly yahoo does, digg does, supposedly google, capital one bank. Tell me now how its lower quality.
PHP is not "lower quality". It really depends on how much effort a programmer put into it when they are coding PHP or ASP.net. If they do a half-assed work, then obviously it'll turn out a "low quality" product. You will also get a lot of support in PHP. By the way, Twitter is by Ruby. lol
One is not better than the other. Your website functionality might ultimately favor one technology over another (built in Silverlight for example) but if not, let the programmer make the call. You want a quality programmer who can communicate with comfortably. Then let him/her suggest which language might be more appropriate.