It’s interesting to look at the software development jobs available at Amazon.com to see how the big boys build their sites. At Amazon.com, they’re looking for C and C++ programmers who write Unix software. None of the lightweight stuff for them. eBay also writes all of the stuff for their site in C++, but as ISAPI modules. They went with IIS because when they first started out, it was cheaper to go with NT than Unix (never mind that Yahoo! was running on FreeBSD at that time).