.net/mssql

[Online]

I have decided to hire a wed development company to create an in depth web application for me. The technology that they are using is .net/mssql.

My brother in law has just informed me that it will cost me $20,000 - $30,000 to purchase a license to be able to operate my web site after the developer is finished.

Can anyone elaborate on this? Is it going to cost me big to operate my web sites?

[Kuriyama]

"My brother in law has just informed me that it will cost me $20,000 - $30,000 to purchase a license to be able to operate my web site after the developer is finished."

This depends on a lot of things. Are you hosting your own website or paying a hosting company to handle it? If you are starting from scratch, a lot of your cost will be hardware (servers) and bandwidth.

A few quick points.

- .NET is free to develop with and don't let anyone tell you other wise. Do Not let a company sell you the full version of microsoft visual studio unless you have a development team that can use it. The express additions will work fine if you intend to maintain the code yourself or have a very small number of people working on your site.

- MSSQL (MicroSoft SQL Server) is not free. You will be charged a licensing fee which can get expensive. Depending on your current hardware you might need to purchase additional servers that just run MSSQL. MSSQL is a great database, but you are more or less paying for nice admin tools and a few additional pieces of functionality. MySQL is free and more or less will do what you need. Your brother in law probably got the 20-30k price tag by looking at this site. http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/pricing.aspx (http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/pricing.aspx). It sounds to me like you are not in need of enterprise database software.