[philhippus]

When you get 90x the performance using C rather than PHP, the only thing stopping its use is human resources. To put it into perspective, you would need 90 PHP servers to do the same work in the same time as a single C server. Any more debate?

[debacle]

Yes, the cost equation of X PHP developers + 90 servers might be cheaper than the cost equation for Y C programmers + 1 server.

Y is almost certainly greater than X.

[philhippus]

While that may be true for the short term, what about the power, maintenance, storage etc costs that recur? I'm not sure a C dev's pay is equal to the running costs of a server farm...

[asdasf]

People constantly repeat that, but I never see it actually be true. I frequently see people spend tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars on hardware and hosting costs just to save $5k of developer salaries. Just because they have internalized this notion that "hardware is cheap, developers are expensive", and don't ever actually look at the numbers.