[treehstn]

I am going to build a website with the single minded purpose of returning data from a database that users can search. I have a programmer (kind of!) who will build the interface and the query structure and I will be working with the database and the data itself.

Users will be required to pay for a subscription to get any data out of the database. I know of another database online that requires a subscription and if I am in that database with a user name and password and someone else (a family member) is on another computer and tries to use the same user name and password the system won't let them in.

My questions are:

1. Obviously it is possible to set it up so that the system either knows that someone is logged in or it knows the IP address of the user (or some other identifying value). How is this accomplished?

2. Can it be set up so that the system knows that different computers have been using the same user account to log in?

Even if I just knew the keywords of these concepts I could do some more research on it on my own. I'm just not sure where to start looking! Web security seems to mostly be talking about hacking not account abuse.

Thanks tons!!

Cheryl

[Snake~eyes]

1. Obviously it is possible to set it up so that the system either knows that someone is logged in or it knows the IP address of the user (or some other identifying value). How is this accomplished?

You can use a serverside language that can set a cookie to identify the computer and also with the use of finding the users HOST and IP address. You can use PHP or ASP depending on what your server supports to identify these.

2. Can it be set up so that the system knows that different computers have been using the same user account to log in?

There is no sure fire way to identify if users are using different computers. You can log IP addresses but whos to say its not a person on a laptop with different connections. You can use cookies but whos to say the person didn't delete their temporary files.

[doggard]

You will also need to research the protection of data acts relating to your hosting country.