If your server is windows, you can pretty much run anything, but they are a little more expensive unless you go small time and get free space some of the hosting companies offer.

A Unix/Linux server is pretty much limited to PHP, Perl and those flavors of languages, but the servers are much cheaper than windows unless you go small time with one of those freebee hosting companies.

But as far as your personal windows machine and Internet Explorer, you can run anything through them no matter what flavor of server or programming language is hosting your site.

As far as programming languages go, it's pretty much a matter of taste, but from what I understand, ASP/VBScript is much easier to learn than PHP or Perl. But that's not everyone's experience.

I've played around with PHP and, for me, it wasn't difficult to understand, but I am a seasoned programmer. I learned all my programming in visual basic and all of its different flavors: Quick Basic, VB4, VB5, VB6, VBA, VBScript, VB.NET...

> OK, this is going to be a dumb question, but
> if I have a windows OS, can I use a
> Unix/Linux server? Or am I stuck with a
> windows server? Or does it just depend on
> what server I install?