Ask HN: Any Successful Startups using Microsoft Dotnet Stack?

The costs of Windows hosting has come down a lot over the years, so it's not the hosting costs that will kill you. More likely, it will be the expense of hiring additional .NET developers. The company I work for runs 200+ sites (most through acquisition), and when we inherit a new site that's not LAMP, it's not long before we migrate it to LAMP, just because it's cheaper to maintain. We have a handful of .NET sites, and a few Ruby sites, and I'd bet that the salary of the 4 or 5 guys who work on those sites is more than the combined salary of the other 50 PHP devs.

That said, if you can get the project profitable enough on your own, maybe you can afford to hire additional .NET devs.

A better question would be whether if .NET is the right tool set for the scope of your project not if a YC startup is using it?

If you are looking to explore and are open to learning further, by all means, jump into Django. On the other hand, if .NET access is no problem to you and your collaborators and that it fits your problem scope, go forth.

This seems like a great opportunity to learn a new language, framework and IDE. Visual Studio is an awesome IDE but it's always valuable to learn something different and be able to integrate that in your day job. To answer your question, a successful site that keeps popping up that uses asp .Net MVC and the Microsoft stack would be StackOverflow.com

What means "personal"? Do you do it mainly for the fun or for the money? If it's the second, it's a no brainer. Use the tools you know and focus on you problem domain.

If its an experiment or an exploratory project, well, use whatever appeals to you.

FWIW, the reason I choose Django for my latest project is the admin. For a lot of internal facing stuff, I am running it off the admin framework and it has saved me a lot of time from writing html and JS template/code. I do not know much about .NET.. but if there is such a functionality, I would suggest got for it. What you know is going to make you more productive.

So far what I knew are StackOverFlow.com and PlentyOfFish.com

1- The stackoverflow engine is a great example. Also you have the power of SilverLight, if you want to make your application interactive.

2- You are not really locked in, you should just pay the server licenses. Expensive, but that's the price you pay for using MS products. Read Jeff Articles about StackOverFlow, they have mentioned licensing and its matters.

3- Not So Cool? You already said, it has an awesome IDE?

To answer your original question, look at Microsoft BizSpark which is a program from MS to encourage startups to use the .NET stack. Plenty of companies that have been successful with it.

But I wouldn't pick it unless there is a large pool of .net talent you can pick into - as startups I have worked with here in the US who have been .net based have found it hard to hire top-quality folk into a .net stack.

Writely (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writely#History), one of the precursors to Google Docs, was written using the .NET stack. http://scobleizer.com/2006/03/09/congrats-to-writely-for-usi...

http://www.ubernote.com uses ASP.NET, although it doesn't use MVC.

We use ASP.NET at Feedity - http://feedity.com

Drop me a message if you would like to know more about ASP.NET in the production environment, automated build/deployment, affordable hosting options etc.

plentyoffish comes to mind..but am not sure if they use any MVC framework