Social Networking site getting makeover

About a year ago I bought a Social Networking site. The site has been around for about 10 years. Before Myspace really took off the site was getting close to 40,000 unique visits per day and more than a million unique visitors per month.

As Myspace and Facebook started to take off the previous owner was discouraged and stopped maintaining the site. The site now gets an average of 5,000 unique visits per day and about 140,000 uniques in a month.

The site has about 80,000 members and I have their e-mail addresses in my database. I realize most of them are old, but I still think I could pull at least 1,000 members back to the site with an e-mail blast. The thing is I don't want to do that until I have given the site a total over haul. I think pulling 1,000 members back, word of mouth, and various other marketing strategies will bring the site right back to where it was in no time and give me a chance to take it to new heights.

The site was built years ago and to me seems pretty dated. It is built with ASP, XML, JAVA, and it's using SQL Server 2000. It is mostly tables nested in other tables and really needs to be cleaned up.

I want it to keep up with more modern sites and have the latest technology. At the same time I am not working with a huge budget so cost is a factor.

My question is should I keep it in ASP and .Net? Should I keep using SQL Server 2000? Is there something newer/better?

What are the pros and cons about building from scratch with PHP and MYSQL? The site consists of user and band profiles (w/comment boards on each profile), concert calendars, and a classifieds section. I'd like to add forums, update the profiles, add video and new audio uploaders, and a few other features.

I'd like to see as many different opinions with reasons supporting those opinions as possible. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Feel free to send me an instant message as well. Thanks!

 

No reason why not to keep it in .Net (though dont know why it has Java in it as well unless you are saying it is java written in the .net framework) - MySpace is now written in .Net so it can clearly work for a social networking site.

If the coding all works as it should do why not keep the data, data access and application layers and simply alter the presentation layer? If it is written in .Net v2.0 then you can upgrade to 3.5 without any issues as it is simply extra functionality added to 2.0 but includes a few much nicer tools for data presentation.

There wasnt the worlds greatest difference between SQL 2000 and 2005.... it does look like 2008 (release date Feb) will be a bigger step forward but not possitive it will be of much benefit to you

Pros and cons of PHP? didnt realise there were any pros of php other than the volume of free samples/ applications

 

So SQL Server 2000 isn't too out dated then? I guess just updating the presentation layers probably would be the best bet then. That is what I have been leaning towards anyway.

I'm pretty new when it comes to programming so some of my questions might not even make sense!