What are the top sites known to be running ASP or ASP.NET?

9 points by shoover ↗ HN
In a discussion with some programmers about Facebook HPHP, one participant voiced an opinion that it's ridiculous how hard companies will work to avoid using Microsoft products, the theory being they could just pay for them and not have to worry much about performance.

There are plenty of angles to take on that, but it got me thinking: what top sites do run Microsoft web products? The biggest ones I know of are: - stackoverflow.com - accuweather.com

13 comments

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Maybe I'm missing something but... how does having paid for a software license mean you "don't have to worry much about performance"?
You're not missing anything. It wasn't a solid theory.
Summary of webservers being used by the alexa top 100: http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/03/18/apache-dominates-the-top...

Plentyoffish.com is famous for being built and scaled by one man on ASP.

I'm sure Microsoft.com and their other properties are primarily on their tech stack(hotmail, msn, etc.)

I'd bet that every site that has experienced any scaling concerns uses a combination of technologies. For example, much of facebook is actually written in C++.

I noticed (and was surprised at) vans.com using asp.net.
The argument is BS. Regardless of your technology stack performance will be an issue. ASP.NET MVC is a solid software stack and fully capable of being used in high-performance / high-traffic websites but that doesn't mean that going MS is a panacea. Indeed, if anything I think the consensus is that most naive ASP.NET webforms based websites are as poor performers as the average naive PHP based website.
ASP.NET MVC has only been around for a year or so, a dynamic version of C# only a few months. There's nothing wrong with MS's MVC framework or dynamic language but Rails and Django have a massive headstart.
"There's nothing wrong with MS's MVC framework or dynamic language but Rails and Django have a massive headstart."

Wow, Rails and Django have a head-start on MS's web technologies? No, not even close. Slapping a new name on it does not let them restart the clock and act like they're brand new.

I'm not sure what you're saying. That ASP.net MVC or dynamic typing in .net isn't new?
tjoos.com is a huge coupon site that runs on ASP classic
Plenty of Fish, last I checked.
MySpace. They were ColdFusion but moved to Asp.Net for performance. They were running blue dragon as a hybrid for a while...not sure if they still are.