I thought this article was interesting and well thought-out. (Disclaimer: No, I'm not the author, and I don't have any sort of affiliate status. I just learned some from reading, and it happened to agree with my personal experience). PHP evaluation PHP has its place. If you're building a "serious" website, you might want to go with a different technology. The author of this article, as far as I understand, recommends perl. Personally, I think that actually writing perl is...well, something I'll refrain from mentioning on the Internet. (For those of you who haven't spent much time here, there's not much that's unmentionable on the 'Net). When it comes to serious sites, though, I think there are quite a few valid alternatives to PHP. (Some of those alternatives are free and require more work. Fine. Work harder. <shrug>. Others are MS solutions for which you have to pay. If the solutions are an order of magnitude (or so) better than you could come up with using PHP, then did it really cost that much? Except, of course, for the Free Software, RMS factor. Each of us must consult our own personal evaluator at this point, to determine the value of any given degree of freedom. :|