You are going to need a pretty serious setup, providing security and backup capability, which is also scalable by the sounds of it.
For serious software projects I would go with .Net.
In your case I would be thinking dedicated server, probably a cloud server (for scalabaility and backup capability), running windows, ASP.Net MVC for the web site, HTTPS where required and SQL Server for the DB.
Each of these elements are a skillset in their own right, there are many books but it has been a long time since I have had need for them (over 10 years) so I cannot really advise on which books to choose.