I would like to expand on Linda Swifts' recent message on this forum...

I am investigating various ways of accessing and maintaining Fox data via dynamic web pages. My preferred solution would be to use FoxWeb (take a look at the new version 2.0 - it's brilliant!) and script/prg files using a mixture of HTML and Fox code.

My problem is finding a company that will host such a site for a reasonable fee. It appears no site will entertain the idea unless I hire a dedicated server, for which the going rate here in the UK is around 250GBP (360USD) per month! That's pretty steep for a small UK business venturing out on its first web-site!

Another solution (which I would prefer) is to host the server myself and get a static IP address which the ISP could use to direct web-page requests to my server. The problem here is the communications line. Here in the UK we only have ASDL (broadband), but that is not yet available in my area (British Telecom says it's coming soon, but cannot say when). We have ISDN (128k), but this is very expensive to keep permanently connected. Is ISDN or ASDL suitable for hosting a small site?

A more econimical solution (though not my favoured one) may be to use shared hosting using ASP pages with VFP COM objects. The companies I have contacted so far all support ASP, but only accessing VFP tables via ODBC, which means I can't use the power of VFP. It seems they are only interested in Access or mySQL. The response so far has been "if you want to use shared hosting you cannot supply any executables or .dll files which have to be registered, as this may impact on other sites running on the same machine." AFAIK VFP COM objects have to be registered (including the VFP runtime files?). Is there any way around this problem, or are we back to dedicated or self-hosting?

So what's the best way to go about this? I would especially like to hear of UK users experiences and/or recommendations. I am not averse to hosting via a non-UK site (and I am willing to be persuaded that I needn't worry), it's just that I feel more comfortable not having to phone 'across the pond' if I need support.

Any help would be appreciated.

Alan Harris-Reid