I think I know what I'm doing, I've been running my own websites for years now, some on a university account where I'm a student, and some on free hosting sites.

Here's my 1st question - I'm designing websites for two different people (maybe more) and they want me to manage them. They're fairly simple sites, some calendar scripts, email forms, and maybe a shopping cart or two for a small amount of merchandise (band websites) such as CDs etc. How far over my head am I getting by doing this from home with Windows XP and DSL? I think my ISP will allow it since I've been running my own free sites for some time now. I've never had boughten a domain name and transferred it to a host and used their email forwarding. I think I'll be fine but should I be scared of anything?

2nd question - I've taken care of the domain names, but I'm still shopping around for hosting. Considering the size of the sites I don't need alot of space (except for maybe some audio/video). I'm leaning towards godaddy.com from what I've heard. Anyone have anything to say about them or any other suggestions? All Feedback is appreciated, thanks,
Lou.

Hello Lou-

I personally would not host my sites using my home computer and a DSL connection for two reasons.
1.) Many broadband companies have begun running automated bandwidth checks, and if they happen to notice that you have been using up a lot of bandwidth and find out that you are running a web server on your account, you may have your account terminated. Check the Terms of Service. Some ISP's also do port checks to see if there is any type of server running on ports 80, 21, and a few others.
2.) When you begin to host more and more websites from a home used computer, performance will begin to slow, and it could get messy.

As to your second question, check out my signature.

Find a good reseller hosting account and setup your multiple sites for one price - you can then provide the hosting service to your clients as an extra value or for a minimum fee

I don't really understand what a reseller account is, could you please explain it to me?

it means that you buy one account that allows you to setup multiple different domains / sites , and each site can have own admin username and password. for instance you buy 20GB of traffic and 2GB space and setup all of the sites that you need for one low monthly fee, instead of paying for each site saparetly.

right on, thanks. I have a million questions, so if you don't mind I'll use this forum to ask the more intelligent ones when I think of them.

not a problem :-)

I was going to use hostrocket for a host, but not sure if they do reseller hosting. If they do, I like them, otherwise any suggestions for a reseller host? (shameless plug here?)

To buy my domain names I was leaning towards namecheap.com.

Another newbie question: If I were to add a merchant account to a site, I've heard you shouldn't use one that comes with your hosting plan. Is this true? If so, any suggestions on who to use?

Depends on the merchant service, usually signing up for a merchant service has nothing to do with the hosting company itself.

For example - we provide merchant services to our clients on a discounted rates but we are not the merchant provider itself (one company can't handle the overhead) - the benefit is that the client get lower rates and lower setup fee comparing to if you go to sign up with the merchant provider directly.

Domains - most of the hosting company provide free domains, but if you'd like to have more control over it you should sign using a domain registrar

I have been using sultanhost.com reseller hosting from some time without any major problem..