services marketplace site help please.

I plan to build a services marketplace like elance.com. I am working on the specifications of site, and searching for hosting plans.
Though my site may only gain a small number of users in the early stage, I hope it will become very popular eventually. I really appreciate it if you could give me some suggestion about the following:

1. Among cgi, perl and php, which one is better to implement the site? I don't know much about MySQL. Is it difficult to customize the site to use MySQL?

2. Subscribers of my site will only have text descriptions of their profiles. All project information and private messages will be kept for certain period of time, then be removed from the system. The site will be pretty much like www.scriptlance.com. Basing on that, what kind of hosting plan is good for my site?

Thanks a lot.

My recommendation would be to get with John Cokos. He developed a framework already for this in the Ilance script. I don't know if he is in active development with it but it will sure beat starting from scratch and like most of his scripting is fairly extensible.

John?!! You here?

Firstly, perl and php are languages and both will interact with an sql database. cgi is simply a folder on a server or a service where you can execute scripts, you can't communicate with sql by using cgi. proabably the most common language used with mysql is php. Not hard to customise if you have a good database with php files ready, you only need to configure it for your needs.

As for a hosting plan my suggestion would be to use a reseller plan - cheaper and you can control the size and bandwidth to some extent as the site grows.

Paul.