Re: Oh dear...3 votes for insane!

ceri shaw wrote:
  I was hoping to get around it by not spending a heck of a lot of time 
in Windows.
Also I do not envisage getting a huge number of hits on the site and 
most of them would be "one-off's".

At the risk of beating a dead horse, there are very few ways to 
demonstrate site/business quality in a user-understandable way.

Maintaining consistent operation is one of the most fundamental ways to 
demonstrate that your services are worth using.  If a site can't 
maintain 99.9% uptime, why would you trust them to maintain your privacy 
and financial security?

I bring this up b/c it's also something you should be thinking about 
even when you go to a dedicated box or service.  Look into caching 
before you go too far into your development.  Sites that are needlessly 
dynamic are often difficult to cache well and being able to cache is a 
key element of delivering a stable service.

> 
> As far as storing customer info etc is concerned I was hoping to dodge that by accepting orders via email

Sensitive data is sensitive data.  E-mail is easy enough to secure in 
transit, but it can be difficult to manage in a secure fashion.


Surely I wouldnt need to store much customer info on the server if I did 
that?

Ideally, you don't want to store *any* customer info on the server.  The 
very best way not to lose customer data is not to store it on publicly 
available hosts.  Your best bet is to segregate your public web site 
from your payment operations.

If/when you get a merchant account, you can use the merchant payment 
gateway as a secure host for storing your customer data... if you do 
that, all you have to keep/manage is the relatively un-sensitive 
transaction id # and maybe a transaction amount.


> Am I wrong in thinking that FC2 would enable me to do this given that I eliminate the dual boot problem?

Any of the major distros can run a good (or bad) commerce site. 
Virtually anything you might use is available anywhere you go.

What varies are the setup details, eg: all distros can run Apache, but 
there are differences in how Apache is started, monitored, logged, 
configured, and managed.

Distro geeks can go on at length about one distro's exact tuning and 
tradeoffs vs. another's.  Bear in mind that there is a *lot* to be done 
before those kinds of considerations will have any appreciable impact on 
your results.

Whatever distro you choose, your system will only work well if it's 
carefully configured and well maintained.  Get that first 80% before 
worrying about the last 20.  :-)

But since you *are* distro shopping, I'd suggest taking a look at 
Gentoo.  It's a (generally) sane, well-supported distro that gives you a 
lot of control over exactly how close you are to the bleeding edge.

HTH,

Dylan