Please help me, for the love of all that is good!

I have a company set up- I'm kind of a smaller branch of another company, but that's not important- and I have these great products, plus a portion of the proceeds are going to help save the rainforests. I decided a few months ago that I had to have a website- I thought it was a great idea, I can just refer all new prospects to it and they can sell themselves on the idea without the pressure of a hard sell. So I got Frontpage 2000 and I have an entire website designed. It's great, I'm very proud.

Now for the problem. I thought I just had to pay $19 a year or so to get my domain name registered. But no...there's something called "web hosting" and my site needs to have a server...well, after days of searching the internet I finally understand what a server is and what a web host is. But I'm still terribly confused and am groping around in darkness for an answer to my questions.

I need three things from my web host, basically:

1- Frontpage server extensions for Frontpage 2000, which most people seem to have...

2- Reasonable prices.

and 3- I need to be able to get credit cards and ordering information over the internet.

Number 2 and 3 seem to be problems at the moment. I don't know what I need to be able to get credit cards- some kind of secure connection, right? I can process credit cards myself, in fact I need to be able to take them and process them myself, I just need to GET THEM without letting hackers see them. So can I just get a secure connection on one page for one piece of information??? What in the hell is an "e-commerce solution" and why does everyone think I need a "control panel" and why do they think I need to pay so much for one? I'm just horribly confused....I think I'm going to revert to caveman talk soon and start speaking in "ugh"s.

All I want is a place to publish my website and get my domain name registered with a secure connection. I don't want some kind of other program or online storefront or whatever, I already have made my webpage! I just want to publish it! I don't understand! Ugh!

And I really am totally out of money here, I can't spend another $100 right off the bat...one site I went to wanted me to pay $30 for an "e-commerce solution", $50 for a startup fee, and $19 to register my domain name...I just don't have a lot of money to work with here. So can anyone help? Thanks so so so so so so much in advance, and I'm SORRY FOR THE LENGTH OF THIS POST!!!!

You would have more luck with this in the webhosting requests forum. :)

You should, be able to get what you ask for for no more then, 25/month + Domain Name registration fees.

Get a $10/yr domain at register4less.com and then find a *reliable* hosting provider that offers:

- shared SSL for a no-cost secure solution
- if you don't plan to have shopping cart software you don't need the "e-commerce" solutions, just the secure connection if your process it by hand

Try the requests forum to inquire about hosting plans.

If you already have the domain name, then you just need a host to create the account to make your site visible on the Internet. Then for the credit cards, you can either get a merchant account through your bank, but this can be really costly.

Or you can get a 3d party merchant account, like revecom.com or 2checkout.com which only has a setup fee and a per transcation fee.

Let me see if I can help explain this a little further.

In order to secure your reception of credit card information, you will need to have a site/page that sits under an ssl certificate. This page would be accessible under a url something like https rather than http. This provides the security that you are looking for and that little lock in the right hand corner that tells your users it is ok to give this info.

Now, how do you get this ssl certificate? There are 2 ways to do it.

1. Purchase a ssl certificate for anywhere from $49-299+. This would enable yoru ssl url to look something like https://www.savetherainforest.com/givemoney.htm

2. Select a hosting provider that provides a shared ssl certificate. This means that the hosting provider has purchased the aforementioned ssl certificate. The only downside to this is that when the user gets to the place in your site where they go to put in the credit card info, they would have to be forwarded to a url that looked something like https://secure.servername.com/~rainforest/givemoney.htm

The upside to option 2 is that it shouldn't cost you anything upfront. Just be sure you select a provider that provides a shared-ssl certificate for the server that you are going to be on.

OK... easy now... :)

Go to the request forum and ask for:

How many MB you need for the site (check the properties of your files and folders if your uncertain).
How many people you expect to visit per day or month (this is to give them an idea about bandwidth).
That you need to recieve creditcard-info on-line and need SSL (Secure Server).
That you need Frontpage extensions (a lot of Linux servers don't have this).
Cheap price (maybe a little about weither or not the site is for charity).
Domainname registration can be optional, because it might be cheaper to get it directly from GoDaddy or Namecheap.

Most answers will have a monthly price, so check what it will be in a year. Maybe you can get a dscount if you pay yearly.

When you get a few resonable answers, search the forums for their names to see what people think about them, or ask a question in this forum about the ones you are considering.

Hope it helps! :)

Looks like she has already got the name, guys. ;) Or am I wrong???

/me hands mrambassador a tissue :bawling:

If you have a merchant account and just want a simple "signup for this service" type form the easiest thing to do is to have PGP (a public/private key encryption program) installed on your computer and have the web host setup a script on the server to encrypt the credit card details and e-mail it to you. I have setup several such things in the last few months.

What ends up happening is an online form is submitted over an SSL connection so that all of the information is protected from electronic-evesdropping. Once the data reaches the server, a program takes all of the information and encodes it in such a way that nobody who does not have your secret private key and password can read the data. Once the encrypted e-mail reaches your computer, you use the PGP program and your passphrase (a password that can be a sentence) to unencode the message and get your customer's information).

Key works here are PGP or GNUPg.