I'm working on setting up a website that offers downloadable educational images. It'll be a pay site (by creditcard). Basically I'd like to be able to set it up so that it requires paid membership to access the website. My question is, how do I set it up so that when someone wants to join they fill in their creditcard details which when authorised an email will be automatically sent to them with their login and password.

Is their a host that offers this system or do I need some kind of software?

Thanks.

Should be simple:

- Password protect the page in question. Any decent host offers this feature. Better choose a host that simplifies the task of password protecting pages through a webcontrol (e.g. olm.net).
- Collect credit card details via order form on your site
- Process the charge and e-mail them their username/password
- Add the username/password as a valid login for the password protected page

If your host doesn't offer a tool to handle password protection, there are numerous cgi's out there you can install that will give you a web interface for handing this.

e.g. for a list of perl cgi's that do this, go to
http://cgi.resourceindex.com/Programs_and_Scripts/Perl/Password_Protection/

I don't know how you plan to handle CC:s, but if you does not have a merchant account and plan on useing a thirdparty processor, then take a look at 2checkout.com. They have a
free CGI script available for download which ( integrated with the payment process ) does exactly what you want.