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This is a real problem that I and my client are struggling with in thinking about the future growth of his company. Please let me know if this, a non-programming issue, isn't appropriate for this forum. I'll keep is as short as possible. XYZ company is involved in the facilitating business alliances and they publish their own quarterly magazine on the subject. Their current website is split between two different hosts. The part they take care of themselves is strictly informational and for non-members. The other part, which requires database support, is for its members and is hosted by the i-gotcha.com (made up) company who's business it is to do exactly that. Apparently, when XYZ first started the site, they didn't want to deal with the db aspect of designing a website and farmed it out. Now they want to expand operations by selling their valuable articles, editorials etc., that they have compiled over the years, on their own "XYZ-media" website. A pricing structure will be designed for members, non-members and according to the type of distribution rights they want. The problem, of course, is that they don't really control their own membership information and so how does a member log into XYZ-media to make a purchase? A temporary solution that one of the managers came up with is that members could log into i-gotcha.com and receive an authorization code (which would include their member "level" which has an effect on what they would pay to purchase something) and then log into XYZ-media with that code. Sounds a little clunky to me. Some talk of a web-service was mentioned but the $1000/mo price tag quote from i-gotcha put a halt to that. I'm not an expert in this type of thing but my thought is that XYZ needs to break loose from i-gotcha as soon as possible. Otherwise, if they want to continue to expand in their services it's never going to be pretty. However, I might be missing something. Is it possible to say, query a database on one URL from another URL just to get 3-4 pieces of data that might be necessary. Even if that's possible, seems like i-gotcha would be taking a security risk ? My thoughts are either a web service ($$) or ditch i-Gotcha asap. Again, I know this is a non-programming question and maybe not appropriate here but it's still an interesting db problem that's probably not all that rare. Thanks for your valuable input.