Hi everyone! I am wanting to start a business that will allow people to purchase access to some webspace and templates to create their own webpage. I am trying to find literature that can help me learn how to set up this type of website (when someone purchases, they have access to X amount of webspace on my domain, how they can access templates for their pages, etc.)

Any idea on where to start? I know how to design a webpage, but I am having a hard time translating my very tiny skill into such a large operation.

Thoughts?

Thanks so much!!
Heidi

This would be best done in PHP so you probably should try the PHP board.

Well, right now theres not a whole lot of advice that I can give you, but for the whole payment part, I would suggest using Paypal along with its versatile IPN script. (Instant payment notification). You can use this script to pass certain variables to pages on different websites from paypal, to do certain things once a user has sent a payment.

www.paypal.com/ipn is the main page for the IPN

If you use paypal, I suggest you visit www.paypaldev.org. It is a great website which can help you with just about anything related to paypal.

You might want to look at starting hosting business that offers templates as a product.

If your business is going to be successful you'll need a lot of space for all the websites and I think most people would prefer to have their own domain name instead of being a subdomain or subdirectory of yours.

Thank you all so much for your advice. If anyone else knows what I might do, it would be great to know! I posted a similiar question on this board because I couldn't find my original post, so please pardon the repetition.

Thank you all!
Heidi

My first post here on these boards.
I went through the same thing you are asking about.

I lease a co-located server at http://iweb.ca
and subdivide the space for my hosting clients.

An account gives them free software for design and things like forums.
everything is administered through CPanel.

Reg

There are hosts that will sell you a large chunk of server space, and then give you the resources you need to resell it to other people. Just google "reseller hosting", or check out some of these:
http://www.ehostpros.com/reseller/reseller.html
http://www.hostgator.com/resellers.shtml
http://www.hostdepartment.com/

Tom
TheGreatTrafficExperiment.com