On the PHP side Laravel 4 is great fun to work with. It's fast, easy to learn, very expressive, and cutting edge. It's still in beta, but is stable code wise (over 1000 unit tests). The only down side at the moment is that it's beta, and they won't have it feature locked until May (then a stable 6 month release cycle). http://four.laravel.com/ and https://tutsplus.com/course/whats-new-in-laravel-4/ are good places to learn about it. Performance is amazing as well. It all depends on what you want to do, but I've fallen in love with programming again thanks to Laravel.

WIPO handles .COM domain disputes. Who else would he go to? Just because you don't support something doesn't mean you don't use it if that's the correct channel.

Ron Paul owns the trademark on his name. So if your name is Ron Paul then you have a strong case for fare use of the domain (the original owner had this). If it was a grass roots organization that did not do for profit work then it too would have a fair use argument (it is a for profit business though).

The truth is lots of people thought the .COM was his official site because it had his name and HIS FACE plastered all over it (read the angry people on the Facebook page). Not only that it was selling merchandise with his name and face all over it and taking donations (from many thousands of people apparently). This is a for profit business that is making a profit a profit from his name, likeness, trademark, and supporters. They contacted the trademark holder to sell the domain to him for a substantial profit (over $800,000) which is very much against the rules for trademarked .COM domains. They signed a legally binding agreement NOT to do this when the registered (or transferred) the domain. I know as I have done it hundreds of times.

He has every right to protect his trademark and avoid confusion by removing an "impostor" site. The most important reason for a trademark is to prevent "Likelihood of confusion" which certainly applies here. A big indicator of fraudulent registration is "not opportunistically trying to get value by using a well-known mark" which any site selling merchandise, advertising, and trying to contact the trademark owner to sell is certainly violating.

Background on me: Web developer since 1994, PHP developer since 2000.

You can easily support hundreds of concurrent users (per minute, not per hour or daily) with a good PHP VPS setup. Don't think that you have to learn something new, just do it right from the start. People will tell you to build using this or that, but honestly PHP powers some of the biggest sites on the net, so ignore them. While there are limitations they can be easily overcome by a little planning, a good host, and some caching.

My setup has handled over 300 concurrent users with next to no slow down. I typically get sub 1.0 second page load times in Google Webmaster Tools, so it's a good template to start with. It can easily handle over 10,000 very active users a day (if you get more than that you can always scale up the hardware, I use a $50 per month VPS):

1. Start off with a good dedicated server or VPS. I use LiquidWeb or their cloud partner StormOnDemand. Excellent host with the best support that I've ever had in 17+ years as a developer. If in doubt call their 800 support number and count how many rings it takes to get a live person. Storm plans start at $35 a month and you can scale up to beastly 96GB servers quickly.
2. Install APC (or another opcode cache). the guys at LiquidWeb/Storm should be able to do this for you. You can make pages load 10x faster with this.
3. Use a good FAST framework. I love CodeIginter as it's simple, but you can do awesome things with it. It also has full page caching that is nearly as fast as plain HTML. You can deliver thousands of pages per minute if you set things up properly.
4. Put assets (images, css, etc.) in to a folder with a "far future expires" .htaccess and properly version them. This will mean that your visitors will download it (and request it) one time. Follow Yahoo and Google's general guidelines on high performance web sites and you'll do fine (Good Performance == Good SEO).
5. Plan ahead. Make sure you set things up so that you can move to dedicated database servers (easy with CodeIgniter) and cache as much as possible with APC (or whatever opcode cache you use).

If any of this sounds like a lot it's most of the same stuff you would do with any other language. The second and third biggest problems most pages have are poor shared hosts and not properly caching. Once you get those two issues taken care of the rest is cake. The number one problem is getting the page made in the first place. That's why I would say to use what you know, and get it done. Even if you screw up you can always go back and fix it later. Better to get something out there ASAP. Trial by fire teaches you a lot.

Feel free to contact me for help.