I have several dozen asp.net sites and one startup (asp.net + background services). And people ask me why I use MS products, they are expensive. But reality is:

I have several dozen asp.net sites and one startup (asp.net + background services). And people ask me why I use MS products, they are expensive. But reality is: prices of win shared hosting are almost exact like linux shared hosting. Windows licence on Hetzner (or many other win VPS providers) is 15€/m. I don't mind paying 15€/m, I spend more on coffee and cola, and dont make any money from that. And for database, if sql express is not enough, I go with mysql/postgre, simple as that. I also played with ruby and php little bit, but don't find any special advantage or stuff that are hard/complicated/long to do in .net, even they're nice products (RoR at least). All those tools looks very similar to me, and hosting price on VPS/cloud is really low also today. Maybe one thing that's missing in .net compared to some other ecosystem is community, but last few years that changed a lot (to better of course).