Help!

[The Shoe]

Ok, I am a newbie to all of this so stay with me.
I'd like to be able to start my own online help website. One that I can sell my own "online support" product to vendors. I have the software in mind that I'm pretty sure that will do the job....now what is next?

Do I need my own server? If so, what should I look for in it? Basically, I guess what I am asking is how do I put this idea into reality?

[Bullschmidt]

Hi and welcome to the board!

Perhaps this may hopefully give you some ideas:

Web Database Concept
http://www.bullschmidt.com/concept.asp

This is something I put together about ASP that hopefully might help somehow.

You and others can have access to a database hosted on the Web from any location that has a browser with an Internet connection.

The Web database concept makes sense if you and your people want to do work in various locations in or outside the office and still be "plugged" in.

For example you could have employees enter timesheets or have sales reps log their contacts. Or perhaps you'd like customers to be able to check the status of their orders online without having to call the company.

If you want a Web database, typically what would happen is that a database such as Access or MySQL (basically just consisting of tables) would be put on the Web.

Then "dynamic" Web pages (such as classic ASP pages which include VBScript, HTML, and/or JavaScript) would be created acting like the old desktop database's queries, forms, and reports to access the database - all hosted on a Web Server.

Dynamic Web pages are similar in many ways to regular HTML pages. But they are "live" because the user can read from and write to information in the database. An example where you can login and add, edit, or view fictional customers and invoices is at http://www.bullschmidt.com/login.asp

Not all Web hosts will handle dynamic Web pages but many do. The Web hosts that can handle ASP pages usually have a Windows 2000 or Windows 2003 operating system running an IIS Web server.

Here are a few good ASP sites:
o ASP101 Samples - http://www.asp101.com/samples
o W3Schools ASP Tutorial - http://www.w3schools.com/asp
o Microsoft VBScript Language Reference - http://msdn.microsoft.com/scripting/default.htm?/scripting/VBScript/doc/vbscripttoc.htm

And the following newsgroup is good:
microsoft.public.inetserver.asp.general

If you want to move to a low-priced Web host you may want to look into www.best-machine.com where currently for $4.50/mo total you can set up 5 domains (i.e. separate Web sites).

I've used them for some low-priced situations although if you need SSL they may not be what you're looking for.

And you could buy your domains from a domain registrar such as www.godaddy.com.