Hello Colin,
I've answered your questions as following :-
1. Is the Windows Bronze package suitable for what I have descibed?
Ans :- Yes. Windows bronze package will allow you to install some shopping cart softwares from the control panel like Zencart, osCommerce and few more which are opensource shopping carts ( no cost to you ).
2. If I went over my bandwidth I presume you would let me know and I could just udgrade (and not get booted)
Ans :- You will get email notifications couple of times when you exceed 80% limit so you will get sufficient time to contact us and get your account upgraded.
3. You seem to offer some kind of facilities on taking payments. Would this cover what I need? I had looked into linking paypal payments into my
website hosting but if you have tools which would provide payment options that would be great. The payments are only very small so I don't want to have to set up Merchant's etc which costs a lot.
Ans :- You can setup a free account with paypal and pay $50 to 2checkout. This 2 gateways would be more than sufficient for you to accept credit card payments as well as paypal online payments. Both gateways can be used to withdraw payment into your bank account when you have sufficient balance in them. Some people use paypal debit card to withdraw funds from ATM so thats also a good option for you.
4. I wanted a .co.uk name but I notice your offer for free domain registration is only for .com. This seems strange as the .co.uk name would only cost 3 pounds to register per year (at another site) but the .com would cost 10 pounds. It looks almost like you have the free offer the opposite to what I would have expected.
Ans :- Others don't keep any profit margin for themselves in domain registration as they expect customers to purchase hosting accounts as well with the domain name and thats where their policies go wrong as customers need service and support no matter if they purchase a domain name or
dedicated server. We have policy for profit margin so our
web hosting plans look cheap in comparison to other hosting companies but our domain names cost more.
5. If you do take the free domain name do I own it? basically if I move host I can take the domain name with me
Ans :- Yes. You can take the domain name with you but we will reduce price of the domain name from the refund that we will issue.
6. Do I need Dedicated SSL for my online payments or is shared sufficient?
Ans :- You will need dedicated SSL as some potential customers may not signup or pay if they get security warning with shared SSL.
7. Finally (you will be pleased to hear!!) to get going can I simply upload all my .net files and the SQL Server database file to your servers or is there more to it than that (especially with regards to the SQL Server I guess) and is that fact my database built in Express and not the full version of SQL Server a problem?
Ans :- Simply upload your asp.net files using FTP and upload your database from the control panel. We have MSSQL 2005 Express on our servers getting filled right now so you should have no problems with it.