Well... I have dutifully spent the last 6 years as a Billing Systems manager with ZERO web components. I now have a friend asking me about getting her small business on the web and I have to admit I have about a 0.5 on a 10 scale of knowledge. I know just about enough to ask annoying questions. Anyone care to share thoughts on the following?

What kind of a server do you run on, Linux or Windows? Any reason why one or the other?

What server side programming software do you use? PHP, Perl, Java, Javascript?

Do you use a database? Is MySQL a decent platform?

I’ve seen the same shopping cart software on many different sites. Is that something you rent/subscribe to? I’m guessing you pay by the transaction, right?

Does the shopping cart provider also have all the trouble of setting up a merchant account and credit card processing streamlined? How are your orders delivered from the shopping cart service? In a database? XML file? I hope not an e-mail.

Any help/pointers to references would be appreciated. I'd talk to the webheads at my office, but they only think in big terms. I'm curious to know what regular people use.

Bryan