Overview: Comparison between ASP and PHP

Active Server Pages (ASP) is Microsoft's scripting technology for displaying dynamic web pages, ASP programmes mostly use VBScript, JScript. PHP on the other hand PHP is the open source alternative to ASP that runs on multiple operating systems, incuding Linux, Windows solaris and other OS.

Speed PHP is relatively much more faster and stable than ASP, ASP is built on a COM-based architecture so when ever a program tries to connect to a database or he calls a COM object there is an overhead on the server, All this COM overhead adds up and slows things down.
Under PHP, everything runs in PHP's memory space. This means that PHP code will run faster because there is no overhead of communicating with different COM objects in different processes. Again ASP is slower and more memory intensive applications than PHP's model because each ASP language compiler runs in its own process.

Price PHP installtions are definetly cheaper to install, PHP runs great on Linux which is free, on the other hand ASP runs on the IIS Server (Internet Information Server) which need's Windows N.T/2000/2003 Servers.

Apart from that ASP mostly uses MS-SQL Server as the back end which again is expensive, Where as PHP programmes mostly use MySQL which is again FREE!

Editor: I have built sites both with ASP and PHP One of our sites (Funtoosh.com was built on ASP and had been converted to PHP) I had to pay 3 times more for hosting my ASP site than what I pay for my PHP sites and the PHP site is much faster more faster than the ASP!

Next: Your first PHP Code