Re: The future of PHP

As a small business owner (partner, actually), I can address this question below: "Manuel Lemos" <mlemos@acm.org> wrote in message news:3B871DF5.77142696@acm.org... > AFAIK, it costs a lot more money to have any start and operate a > e-commerce business than a telephone. What is the motivation to spend > that much money? Internet hype? On our website, we use PHP/MySQL to serve up our complete schedule plus juggle event requests from different kinds of people, maintain the look of the site, and serve up audio clips. There's also a large backend component, including maintaining our contact lists (very important for a quartet), a database of all music we know and composers, in order to generate a quick program, our press kit, etc. The PHP end has over 4000 lines of code and MySQL has hundreds of tables. We aren't involved in retail, but that may change. To start up the website for my string quartet, there were a few sunk costs. The computer to develop on, the audio equipment to convert audio clips from recordings to streaming content, and then there is the monthly fee for hosting. I already owned the computer, as I use it for other things like having a computer in the house :). total extra cost: $0 I bought the audio equipment in order to enable the quartet to master our own CDs total relevant cost: $0 (in fact, we saved over what it would cost to go to a big studio) The hosting fee is $10/month. The registration fee for 2 domains (chiaraquartet.net/chiaraquartet.com) is $70/year internet access is free through the university we're in residence at. cost: $0 Total cost: $70+120=$190/year Total cost for phone line: $30/month without long distance. Total phone cost: $30*12 = $360/year There you have it. $360 is most definitely > $190. Have we gotten any benefit off of the website? After a year of hosting (and not directly selling anything other than the quartet), several presenters have approached us through the website to offer concerts that paid much more than the cost of maintaining the website. We've gotten the same benefit from having a phone. So, it is definitely worth it, even for a business completely unrelated to technology or even retail sales. Regards, Greg Beaver -- The Chiara String Quartet http://www.chiaraquartet.net