by Lin VanFleet
Have you ever dreamed of starting your own membership site? Some say it's the best way to make money on the Internet, so why not? Well, let's make sure you have the right tools for the job! Starting a membership web site is possible but you will need a hosting company that offers you the right tools to conduct the day to day operations of your site. At minimum the prospective hosting company should allow you the ability to create forms, set up an ecommerce site, community development tools, recurring billing modules and access level controls. But that's not all you will need to build and run a membership web site.
MySQL, PERL, CGI, SSI, CRON, Curl, FrontPage, PHP scripting tools, Python, GD and ImageMagik, which allows you to create streaming videos and music are a few basic programs that come with most webhosting packages. If these are not listed on the hosting company's sales page, either move on to another company or send an email asking for clarification.
Don't overlook your email needs. Your hosting package should come with auto responders, mailing lists, mail forwarding, web mail, Spam control, POP3, IMAP, and SMTP. Again, if in ...