Dee, the person who I trust would provide the best advice on business dev. and IT is randy (rhayman) who repsonded ealier. I trust that he will point you in the right direction. I will offer my 2 cents in hope that it will help you. You can host websites, etc, on a VM that is managed by an external third party, and I recommend that. It will cost you $10 a month of business expenses. They do throttle traffic with appropriate pricing, but they generally know to protect you from Chinese attacks, etc. It has worked for me for many years. A VM some place else will give you PHP over an Apache with a MySQL backend. Some places will offer the MySQL (or similar) as a service, meaning your system will be making queries to an SQL server that is running somewhere else. For website content there should be no real issue (no sensitive data to protect unless you do e-commerce over it). I am guessing most people do this and direct the e-commerce aspect to server over which they have more control or to other fourth parties. Regarding keeping records and running your business, you will need a very robust solution -- this is where I trust Randy's input. Generally speaking, you want some UPS to power your system if it is in house, and to have all the right redundancy in terms of disk RAID. This is for the system that will serve most things to your business and do some log-, book-keeping of data with SQL. A Linux kernel with a robust OS will do all of that and more and robustly. You can self-manage it. Starting with MySQL is fine. It is rock-solid. Suppose you want to transition to another softwre or system, you can extract the tables of the MySQL and use them, possibly after re-formatting them, in a different software database. You can automatically store copies (mirror) the SQL tables and other data on an hourly, or day-by-day basis, etc. People like Randy would know how to set it up for you. That is what consultants are for. My final thought is to take very good notes of how the system is setup. It will help you, and any external person who may need to help you in the future, get a handle of things right away. You will be fine. Good luck with your business venture!