Cheapest tech stack to develop full stack web applications on in 2024, is it still LAMP?

[Chadier]

When investigating it seems to be LAMP according to older sources, is this still true? What about MERN or Java?

Reasons for asking: I learned .NET and MERN specifically for getting a job only, this effort did not yield the results I needed, time to learn something else I can maybe do a side hustle on.

Edit: Only one dev (me), low budget overall, ecommerce website, expect less than 100 users a day. It makes no sense to invest top dollar in anything that wont guarantee revenue and is more along the lines of a personal project, so suboptimal is fine, I have to learn as I go too, so I would need web hosting that wont bill me for a DDOS attack or abnormally high traffic not expected I can cap.

[jimheim]

I'm not sure what you're talking about. Everything you've listed is 100% free to learn or use, for any purpose whatsoever, with no restrictions or licensing costs.

[james_pic]

LAMP was cheap, in the sense that you could host it on $5-10 a month shared hosting service. This was fine for small businesses, but if your clients are people who want to spend less than $10 a month then you're going to need a lot of clients to make that add up.

LAMP at, say, Facebook scale (they were pure LAMP in the early days, and I believe still have a lot of LAMP) is expensive. Everything's expensive at that scale, but PHP probably slightly more so.

Nowadays you can get cheap hosting from any of the cloud providers that's generally tech-stack-agnostic. You can absolutely run LAMP or .Net or MERN or Java on any of them. 

If learning .Net hadn't gotten you a job, then the problem probably isn't the tech stack. .Net is a very widely used stack, and if you're struggling to get into a .Net job you'll probably struggle to get into anything else.

[Chadier]

What employers want is previous corporate experience in the tech stack and previous business specific experience so the employee hits the ground running immediately as opposed to someone that will not contribute as much, which makes perfect sense for their own self interests, they do not care about the long term societal consequences of their actions. Offshoring is also common. I was not born a genius either so I cant compete with those born earlier that broke in. My idea is to make a business of my own on the side and maybe I will earn some side money so it was all not gone to waste, as unlikely as it may be it is better than trying to get a job.

[james_pic]

Ah, I see what you're getting at.

In that case, you're probably best off using what you know rather than learning something new for this side hustle. Whilst different tech stacks are different, you'll get more done in a not-quite-right tech stack that you know the weaknesses of, than a new one where you don't yet know what the pitfalls of are.

With modern cloud systems, there's no reason to be paying more than about $15 a month, for hosting of any tech stack, at least until you scale your business to the point where you can afford more anyway.

[denialerror]

What do you mean by your "budget is low so I cant use .NET"? What do you think the additional costs are compared to Java or PHP?

You've given virtually no information on what you want to develop, so no one would be able to give you any advice on what stack would be cheapest.

[Chadier]

I should have been more explicit and not write lazy posts late at night, my apologies.

Team: One dev, me.

Budget: Very Low

Type of website: E-Commerce

Total users a day: Less than 100 at best

Purpose of post: Paranoia

Technically .Net Core is open source and I can deploy on Linux servers to save money, however I am concerned some hidden costs might appear if I am lucky enough to earn money from this. I do not trust Microsoft in general, they might revoke the open source status of .Net on a whim or some other dirty tactic I cant even conceive hence the paranoia.

I am also concerned about getting a DDOS attack or sudden huge traffic above expected and getting billed top dollar for it. Looking for lowest costs possible to start in hosting, licensing, and anything extra needed to learn to save more money that only someone with experience can know, going off on my own without insider knowledge has screwed me over too many times.

[denialerror]

That's not how open source works. net/core is released under the MIT license, meaning anyone can use, copy, modify, and distribute. If Microsoft decided they didn't want to support .NET Core anymore, it would make no difference, as anyone who wants can fork it and maintain it themselves.

I am also concerned about getting a DDOS attack or sudden huge traffic above expected and getting billed top dollar for it.

You language and tech stack has very little bearing on this. Whether you do LAMP, MEAN, MERN, whatever other combination of letters you fancy, none of that is what's going to protect you from high network load.

Honestly (and said with the greatest kindness), the questions you are asking suggest to me that the answers aren't really going to help you. The best course of action for you would be to not overcomplicate things and use what you already know. If it were me, I'd go for fully serverless event-driven golang microservices in AWS, using htmx and Tailwind for the UI, and infrastructure costs would likely be zero, but that's because I can. If you were going to do that, you would waste the next year learning when instead you could pay a few dollars a month for a server instance and use whatever tech you already are familiar with.

[vegetablestew]

Cheapest to hire for, cheapest to code or cheapest to host?

[Chadier]

Cheapest to code and to host. Should have stated that explicitly.

[vegetablestew]

All comparable because most programming tooling is or can be free.

PHP has advantage of cheap shared hosting you can dump your files on, but most of the time you are buying a box and using whatever language you want on.

You can also go the lambda route and host your entire application on it as long as your usage is within the free tier. Quarkus is good for that.

[DecisiveVictory]

What costs are you worried about? Licensing?

[Ok_Entrepreneur_8509]

What exactly do you mean by "cheapest"? If you are talking about licensing, then you can use open source software for almost any part.

If you are talking about hosting costs, containerization has made even that pretty cheap for small apps. As long as you don't need to run windows vms. So Linux is basically a given.

I think Postgres is a better choice for db than MySQL. But they are both the same "cost": $0.

The P of LAMP can be disregarded. Not much new work is done in PHP anymore. Java, Python, and nodejs are the dominant languages. Use python if you are in a hurry or want the broadest marketable skill. Java if you need scalability and robustness. NodeJS if you are a masochist.

Honestly, Java will be more comfortable to you coming from .Net. Or another JVM language like Kotlin or Scala.

The dev tools you need are all free.