Something to do with dedicated servers

Hi. I am planning to start a business where I teach students online. If you look at yahoo graffiti in yahoo games, you will see that you are able to draw online, and I want such a thing where i can write on something and it immediately gets transfered online. I also want to use a microphone and basically be teaching a class interactively. I also want to be able to accept credit cards. Can anyone who could help me with such a thing?
Greg

see: such a immense project will certanly need more than one guy sitting in front of servers... you have to consider the enormous network traffic your project will need, the enormous programming work and the immense computer power you'll need for the enormous payload such a project will certanly need!

do you have those programmers? do you have those computer recourses? do you have the technical background? yes?

so do it! it sounds a great idea, if you need help with php, linux, server and something to do with this, ask...

regards, thedarkzone

I could give you some advise and ideas. I helped set up an online class room enviroment when I was in college last year working for slave wages in the IT department.

Here are some ideas/thoughts/info:

Accepting CC is not that difficult of a task, you need to have a company to process the infromation. As far as that goes, you could have all the transactions processed through PayPal, but their are plenty of services out there.

Second, to create such an enviroment, you would proably want some sort of chat room that would allow you to use an online note pad. Proably best done in Java, unfortunately I don't know beans (pun intended) about Java programming. Although there is ALWAYS more than one way to do anything in programming. Some are just better than others.

Third, JAVA + Chat ROOM = need for massive server resources. The good news is that processing power keeps getting cheaper. (Hurray for Moore's Law) The bad news is that its still costly to deploy on a massive scale.

Fourth, Data Protection: We kept all grade and records on an AS/400, behind a Linux firewall. The Schools web servers were all Windows 2000 running IIS 5 and we used Cold Fusion as our programming Languge. Worked fine, but there are still security holes in their system. (I can still apparently print to the Lab B printer from anywhere in the world with my iBook via IP printing). That is just a fun college story about people running systems that have really not much of an idea of what they are doing. has nothing to do with your situtation. Its late, too much coffee and I am rambling. Not to mention typing and grammer skills are failing.

I could proably provide some useful tips on what NOT to do and maybe outline a few Opensource solutions that would lower costs a bit in places.

This is my $.02