What’s your minimum viable product

Your MVP is the core set of deliverables you need to get your website deployed—highest return on investment vs. lowest risk. Whatever parameters you have for your website or web application MVP is a good place to start when choosing a stack—then, it can grow from there.

Scalability

Scalability is incredibly important if you see your site or application growing, and a solid stack from the start means a solid foundation. Growth can be vertical, with more programs and processes included in your application, or horizontal, requiring it to run on more machines. It all boils down to solid code and a strong foundation. If growth is in your future, pick a stack that can accommodate a lot of growth without collapsing.

What are your development team’s strengths?

Programming languages and frameworks are one part of a stack, but they do tend to impart their “flavor” on the stack as a whole. If your team has been working with PHP for a long time, a PHP-based stack like LEMP (Linux, Nginx, MySQL, and PHP) or one of its variants is a good place to start. It’s an automatic time-saver.

What platform is best for your project?

Whether it’s the .NET platform, the Java Platform, or Node.js, every platform has its own strengths. There’s no “best” platform—just the best one for your project. This question has a few sub-questions:

How important is speed to your stack choice?

 Node.js is a great choice for speed and scalability. Add to that the fact that it’s written in JavaScript, which makes it fast and universal, and it’s clear why LinkedIn moved from the Ruby platform to Node.js. Another thing to consider is developer time vs. runtime. It’s a general rule of thumb that what speed you gain in development you make up for in runtime and vice versa.

What database is best for your project? 

How you structure your data is central to choosing your stack. For example, if you opt to go with a NoSQL database, you’ll want to choose other components that are most compatible with that database format. Most popular choices are MySQL, Maria DB & Postgres SQL