Offering FREE Services on my site

[spcomputing.com]

Hi all, I would like to offer a free e-mail service to registered users on my web site. Is this allowed on VH? Also, what about offering e-mail at a price? Is that allowed on VH?

Also, as some of you may already know, I create my own PHP Scripts, downloadable for free. I was thinking about offering a free installation service; how do i go about this? What do i need to know about installing scripts on web servers for my viewers?

TIA

[bjorn]

Its not "not allowed" to offer your users email accounts, but as far as I can tell (without beeing 100% sure) VH doesnt seem to like that you try to automatically create email accounts..

When I frist tried to write a php script to create email accounts and change passwords it worked, but when VH fixed their control pannel it stopped working, and I have looked at it again, but not been able to get the script working despite sending exactly the same requests as Explorer does, but as soon as I get to the email manager I get a authentication error.
(And what makes me think they dont like it is the error message I got when they fixed it: "Sorry you dont have access ;-)" and the new field "creationfilter" - yes the simley was in the error message!)

If your're interested i can send you the html requestes i have captured from explorer and the script I have written to pretend to be explorer and create a email account.

The script just sends the same HTTP reqests as your web browser does when you do it manually - except it doesnt work yet.

As far as "remote script" installation goes then you would need to have your user enter their ftp details and path to put the script, and then a php script could connect via ftp and upload the script to the users web space, but beyond uploading the script and setting permissions if needed then I don't know if it can be easily automated (like embedding it into html etc)?

[spcomputing.com]

VH doesnt seem to like that you try to automatically create email accounts

I won't be attempting to create them automatically. Every email account will be created manually.

So, as for the script installation, I will need their FTP Host, FTP User + Pass and path to Install Script.

[bjorn]

Yeah, given all those details you can have your install script connect to their ftp account and upload the script.

As far as the automated control panel script goes I just really dont want to know my users passwords.. Its only friends and family, but still I'd rather not know! (Maybe VH could read this and include a MD5 or SHA1 field to enter a pre-hashed password - only dreaming)

there is a nice php&ftp example in the manual (http://uk2.php.net/manual/en/ref.ftp.php), uk mirror for your convenience (i hope?)