h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

This was originally posted in my journal, and I got pointed your way...so maybe you have an answer for me:

I have the ServerSpy extension for Firefox, and I can see that hootoo is using the Microsoft IIS server. Why is this? Especially since:
a) the main BBC site uses Apache and
b) Apache is the main industry standard for web servers (from what I've seen, IIS is in the minority).

h2g2 has always run on IIS. When we started, we considered what technology to use. The primary choice was the database platform, since so much of what the service would do was reliant on the database. I had already developed several projects on SQL Server, and was familiar with the tools available for tuning performance. I was reluctant to take a chance on any of the open source database servers that were around at the time because I felt they were fairly immature, and I didn't know if they'd have the breadth of tools available to build a fairly complex database in such a short period of time (we had three months).

When it came to the web server platform, we considered going with Linux and Apache, but at the time there were no realistic connectivity libraries for SQL Server (not surprisingly). So we had to go for IIS on Windows.

We did choose perl as the language for the server, with the thought that at some point in the future it could be ported to Linux without much bother, but we soon found that perl was quite resource-hungry, so we decided to rebuild the site as a C++ application.

We spent a fair amount of effort on keeping the majority of the code cross-platform - in theory, to port to another platform only three or four source files would have needed to be changed. But as it happens, it's never been necessary.