Web Hosting

Hi,
I am thinking of developing a new website. The guest and forum facilities are already provided by the hosting company. Do I still have to store the guest and forum data in my database?
Regards
Sarada

Web User
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In response to your question, your hosting providor will need to provide a database that the forum can interact with if the forum uses a database for it's data storage. My hosting provider gives me 10 mysql database.
As far as the guestbook, you can use a database, or you can use a CGI script of some sort and just store the information in a flat text file. That is up to you and/or the guestbook software.

Thanks Gregg. I need to know one more thing. I want to have a news section and news archive in my website. Is it advisable to store it as flat files or it in the database. What is the general way of doing it?

Originally posted by Tina Williams:
Thanks Gregg. I need to know one more thing. I want to have a news section and news archive in my website. Is it advisable to store it as flat files or it in the database. What is the general way of doing it?

Kind of depends completely on you actually. Of course, the easiest way is putting all the news in a Database just because retrieving from a DB is so simple these days. However, It would also depend on how much formatting you needed in the news article and if you needed a bunch of HTML to make it look presentable.
But like I said, I am not sure if there is preffered way except prefered for each person. Personally, I would keep it all in a DB.