I bet you know, that there’s no golden rule – what you should chose is up to your interests, skills and plans for the game (should it be « finished »?) as well. First let me say, that your plans are very ambitious for a beginner… programming a game server alone is everything but trivial. There are also many architectures you could chose from. As I understood for now, you want to create a so called browser game, in the style of OGame, Travian etc, correct? This could be achieved with an event-driven server architecture – maybe stay focused on JavaScript and use a Node.js server. Advantage is, that you are very hip with this stack, nowadays PHP on the other hand is not really meant to power a game server…but for saving stats and small pieces of logic, it will work too. You have to keep in mind that if you want something « massive » on the server side, you have to chose an efficient platform and offload as much as possible to the client. That said, you could consider making the game a single page application, communicating with an event driven server.