MS SQL hosting in UK

[jefreywith1f]

I work in house so I'm used to having all my servers to hand. Now I've had a
offer to do some independent freelance work making a fairly straight forward
web questionnaire. The company requesting the work don't have their own server
facilities so I'll have use a hosting service. I work with ASP.NET & SQL using
Dreamweaver (and have no experience of PHP and MySQL). So I aim to find a good
SQL host, preferably in the UK that can host my pages & database. Can anybody
answer a few questions?

Do SQL hosts also do web hosting, or will I need to a sepatate web host?

Can you recommend a suitable host in the UK?

Would PHP & MySQL be a better/cheaper option and would this be a major leap if
I've only experience of ASP.NET & MS SQL?

I normally use DWMX04 on WinXP, but for this project I'll be work evenings at
home using DWMX (not 2004) on MacOS X - does this have any draw backs?

Sorry for so many daft questions.

Geoff

[David Powers]

jefreywith1f wrote:

> Do SQL hosts also do web hosting, or will I need to a sepatate web host?

Yes and no, in that order.

> Can you recommend a suitable host in the UK?

I have a dedicated server, so can't help with that one.

> Would PHP & MySQL be a better/cheaper option and would this be a major leap if
> I've only experience of ASP.NET & MS SQL?

Yes, it's usually cheaper. It shouldn't be a major leap if you have
experience with programming and database design. I have no experience of
ASP.NET, but I learned PHP/MySQL after using Classic ASP. It's far less
verbose, so I found it a lot easier to work with. Conditional
statements, loops, etc are common to both languages, so it's just a
question of getting the "dialect" right.

> I normally use DWMX04 on WinXP, but for this project I'll be work evenings at
> home using DWMX (not 2004) on MacOS X - does this have any draw backs?

Mac OS X doesn't support ASP.NET. It does support PHP/MySQL, but the
PHP/MySQL implementation of DWMX is not as good as MX 2004. For one
thing, it uses some code that has since been deprecated (although it
should still work).

> Sorry for so many daft questions.

Not at all daft. You should see some of the "questions" that get asked
here. :)

--
David Powers
Author, "Foundation PHP 5 for Flash" (friends of ED)
Co-author "PHP Web Development with DW MX 2004" (Apress)
[url]http://computerbookshelf.com[/url]

[jefreywith1f]

David, thanks so much for your reply, very useful

Geoff