.NET vs PHP – Is Pop Culture On Board?

We already know the popularity of the .Net framework in the enterprise application space, but does .Net have any cache in the world of pop culture?

I decided to do a quick study to see if the .Net framework was penetrating our favorite media outlets like Miley Cyrus, Bethenny, Wendy Williams, Fox News, NPR, NBC etc. And yes, Miley Cyrus has become her own media outlet! Let’s be clear, I may be the Development Diva, but I like my pop culture and I love the gossip! BTW, I hear plenty of internal gossip about MVC, .Net, Java, etc., what a bug kill! For this very scientific endeavor, I started with my BFF Stack Overflow. This is where I found the lovely tool Builtwith. This is an awesome Website dedicated to detecting specific frameworks, email services, analytics, tracking tools, and literally a host (Amazon) of other information – Check it out!

Back to my crude research project. Some of this I had to guess at because all of the information was not provided, so bare with me. If you see a question mark, know that I might be talking out of my a**. Feel free to chime in because these URLs are giving me NOTHING!!!! Some of these folks must be hiding something because I got a lot of NOTHING in the weirdest places. Others, I know from reading articles in these same publications…so, let’s do this!

I decided to look at the server, framework, hosting, and name server. Why you might ask? So I can give you guys clues to help me uncover the mystery, duh!! So here is what I came up with:

Server Framework(s) Hosting Name server
ABC Apache, Varnish NOTHING Amazon? NOTHING
Bethenny Apache PHP and Flash Amazon GoDaddy
Bloomberg Apache, Sun ONE, Sun Java .Net NOTHING Verisign, UltraDNS neustar
Builwith Amazon Route 53 PHP and .Net Amazon? Amazon
CNN nginx NOTHING NOTHING NOTHING
Cspan IIS and IIS7 .Net and Flash NOTHING NOTHING
Fox News Apache NOTHING nLayer, NTT America, Akamai Akamai DNS
Amazon Symantec PHP Self 😉 UltraDNS neustar, Dyn DNS
Huffington Post Apache NOTHING NOTHING AOL DNS and UltraDNS
Miley Cyrus Ruby on Rails, PHP CenturyLink UltraDNS neustar, GE DNS
NBC Varnish Java Amazon? GoDaddy
NPR Apache PHP and .Net NOTHING Savvis DNS
TechCrunch nginx PHP and Shockwave Flash Embeded WordPress, ServerBeach, Layered Tech WordPress DNS
Wendy Williams nginx NOTHING NOTHING NOTHING

As expected the clear winner is PHP, however there were some surprises. .Net is clearly getting some traction in the pop culture world! Flash is not the hotty it used to be and I was happy to see at least one Ruby on Rails site. I expected Amazon to dominate the hosting market and also was surprised that GoDaddy with all those commercials was not a strong contender. Overall looks like most of the newbies and the good ole boys are using Apache servers, aaaahhhh peace has been restored! So help me with the NOTHINGs and correct my mistakes. Remember all scientific endeavors need testing!!!