is PHP or Coldfusion better for a member subscription site where they are accessing protected webpages. ? The protected page may come from a MySql database. just not sure yet. I heard coldfusion is better when you get lots of users (1000 or more) accessing the site at one time as PHP will bring it to a crawl. Also, coldfusion is able to make protected password pages indexable by Google. I don't know so this is why I am asking..I don't want to put up the web source to give free traffic to the place, but is this true..? ultimately I do not expect more than 70 members and the data will not have images, just hmtl text if that helps.
PHP would be your best bet, it's easier to learn, and there are open-source solutions already available for what you need. The programming language used generally doesn't affect SEO
I would go for php as it is more widely used and supported. We have software with tens of thousands of users with 200-300 queries a second performed and have no performance issues.
PHP vs ColdFusion won't affect how google spiders your website, content will. ColdFusion is a clumsy language in my opinion due to the way it uses XML for application logic (which doesn't make any sense at all!), so it may be harder to maintain, unless you or whoever is maintaining your code, is accustomed to it. Whether or not ColdFusion is less efficient than PHP at high server load is really dependent on how the script was coded. They are both efficient languages. Obviously, though, you're asking in a PHP forum so the responses might be a little biased.
Both are equally secure but I have a pointand a question to add to the conversation. Point: PHP is there by default on most servers (unlike CF) so hosting will end up being cheaper and more available. Question: (perhaps best answered by 1eightT) What is the difference between this and cloaking??? I know www.webmasterworld.com did this for ages but have recently changed. Any light to shed on the subject because I hear people speaking of this as a good thing. I have no problems with it but don't see the difference as it's all about duping a searcher and showing a different page to spiders and humans.
PHP is more widely used and supported, not to mention the great community backing. However it comes down to personal choice. PHP will also be available on almost every shared host, this will not be the case with cold fusion.