CMS or Not - and What Language

the best approach for a site I'm planning

[old_expat]

I have a pretty good 5 letter .com domain, some spare bandwidth and an idea for a niche. It is not a unique concept, but has some potential .. I think.

Presently, I'm going through the thinking process of how I want to approach the structure of the site.

It would be a "widgets" site, where small businesses in the niche could add their page = what they offer, a photo or two, who, where, etc. Their page could be in lieu of their own website, or in addition to it.

Should I use a full-blown CMS or a more modest CMS that creates pages that I can include in a template with SSI or iFrames?

Looking as some CMS, what pops out are that most use PHP/mySQL .. which I have available .. but it seems that the mySQL database could get pretty big and slow down the site.

I see a few CMS written in PERL and others using C++.

I guess the first consideration should be the ease of use and some "forgivability" factor (ease of edit).

So I'm looking for suggestions from experienced webmasters.

[physics]

PHP/MySQL should be fine. A MySQL database can take a lot of info and traffic. To find the cms that fits your needs best, check out
[cmsmatrix.org...]

[old_expat]

Hi physics,

I checked out that site .. a very nice one, btw .. and downloaded Drupal. I did some reading on their forum.

The CMS has some great features, but Im wondering about page load times and server resources.

I'm on a VPS.