"> > Thanks everyone. I've got through that. Now I need web hosting. Any > recommendations? They've got a corny name but we're on our second year with them: http://www.WorldwideHosting4U.com We have close to 50 active sites and really depend on the CGI and Perl stuff as well as the speed for largish (20 meg) FTP data exchange. We always have multiple web hosting providers in case one goes down. Over the last five years we've gone through HostColor.com (nice support particularly if your comfortable with Linux, a bit slow, real trouble with up time), HummingbirdHosting.com (excellent uptime, good performance, absolutely nasty customer support), HostForWeb (good uptime but they have a nasty habit of going down for four day stretches when they do go down, terse but competent technical support, and fair speed), and a couple of local arrangements at server farms in the northeast United States (not worth the hassle). WorldWideHosting4U is programmer friendly, genuine human (it's a Ma & Pa operation) technical support, and has a very high bandwidth connection. > Pitfalls I should look out for? Absolutely. Check the bandwidth allowed per month. Check the disk space permitted. If they'll advertise their up-time statistics that's a good sign. Find out if they throttle back bandwith, particularly on the FTP side, or you'll spend your live waiting for the server to respond when you build and maintain your site. Watch out for setup fees -- maybe US$25, but anything more better have a reason. If they allow over 400 sites on a box -- run, don't walk, away. CGI and Shell access are a must if your are going to play with animation or practically any automation. Data safety and site mirroring seems to be a bit of a shell game. Back up your own stuff and be prepared to rebuild it, don't count of your host. In most cases they'ss rebuild You might want to know where the server is physically located. For example HummingbirdHosting is in Australia, but lat I heard the servers were in a farm in Texas, USA. Similarly WorldwideHosting4U is in Idaho (USA) but the server is two or three time zones away in New Jersey (USA). Might be useful to know when a blackout is in the news. > Is there an issue with making sure they provide DNS in the price? Only if they, rather than you, own the domain name. Personally, I'd keep them separate so I can easily change hosts if necessary. Hope this helps, Win Wiencke -- http://www.piclist.com hint: PICList Posts must start with ONE topic: [PIC]:,[SX]:,[AVR]: ->uP ONLY! [EE]:,[OT]: ->Other [BUY]:,[AD]: ->Ads