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There are actually many factors which might affect your decision on sql serever 2012 or 2008-R2. Since the core requirement is to create the web application using ASP.NET, you need to drill down the features that this application is going to offer and then also know what is the objective of this application what will be the life span of this app. And the most important thing what is the budget? Based on the above, you may start looking on the offering both versions has. However it can be a matter of a good arguments on selecting one above the other. A good practice is to always go with most updated and tested (n-1) i.e sql server most latest - 1 will be SQL Server 2012 (I am not recommending this but just trying to explain that many people follows this equation however there are no reasoning available to prove or validate). With SQL Server 2012 (or 2014 you may have much more features + you would have an environment which will be running on latest or close to latest product version. post the above you also need to decide for SQL Server edition as well (in any case of either 2012 or 2008-R2) so you can again compare the features supported by any edition of a particular SQL serevr version you may go through this MSDN link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms144275(v=sql.105).aspx For hardware you can learn the specific details from this MSDN link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms143506(v=sql.105).aspx To conclude, what you should select is completely depends on the core business need, application objective and life cycle. hope this helps.