I'd always go with the latest technology.

But if you can't easily or cheaply get your hands on asp.net, starting with ordinary asp would give you a lot of the basics. A lot of it would carry forwards, but thre will probably be a few bits to 'unlearn'.

The major problem I see at the moment is that if you are hosting on third-party servers, there are not a lot of companies hosting asp.net at a reasonable price.

We host a lot of customer web sites with AIT on Linux servers and we write most of the fancy stuff we need in Perl. We would LOVE to drop Perl and work in asp.net, but nobody can even come close to the prices we pay for the Linux hosting - so we are stuck with Perl for economic reasons.