Well I know little about the tools of this trade (PHP, MySQL etc) but have ideas for algorithms that I wish to implement, which need to be protected and encrypted. How can you rely on commercial web hosts not to obtain your codes anyway? If anyone is an expert in this area, I'd appreciate any tips, along with whatever books, articles, forums, resources you can recommend.

Might I suggest separating your concerns over intellectual property from the skills needed to developer and support and database driven website, at least at first?

You can develop your ideas using software on your own PC/Mac, and thus keep to yourself. You should likely speak to a suitably qualified legal adviser if you wish to protect your ideas (I've no idea if they are patentable, for example).

For small scale local development, look in to what are known as "WAMP" and "LAMP" suites (google for these terms). You can also download virtual system images that contain PHP etc already to run under VirtualBox, VMPlayer etc.

Once you reach the stage where you need to share more widely, you would need to look at the terms and conditions of the any provider. They should make it clear that you own the rights to any material you place on their facilities. I would expect the better known providers to be fine in this regard.

Do please bear in mind that once you place an idea in public view it is nigh on impossible to prevent people understanding what you have done and potentially duplicating it. That is why you need to prepare your legal position in advance. The reality is that if you are not willing to defend your intellectual property then it becomes de facto public, whatever the law might say.

You could also do a lot worse than finding someone trustworthy to help you with the tools, given your current experience. This stuff can get hard quite quickly.

Hope that gives you some food for thought.

Martin

We built a home server which has a number of virtual machines for various purposes; one of which is to test code and ideas which we don't want to upload to a server which we have no real control over (and don't even really know where in the world it is).

shunx, have you made any progress in your quest?