Hi Guys

I am moving my site to a new hosting platform, all my pages in the free area are .asp, not that it really is that important I can change them to anything really apart from my home page that has a "Number Of Users Online" script on it, which I am sure I can replace with some other code and thus change the file extension.

The question is, if I change my home page extensions from .asp to something else, will it affect my search engine ranking/placing or does the extension of the page not make a difference? I am told that I should change over to PHP. I converted my index page in Dreamweaver from .asp to .php and it loaded/previewed fine on my local-host browser. Is this all I have to do, is just save them with the new extension (making sure that all the links are changed as well of course). Should I use .php or could I simply just use .html, what is the difference, is .html just old fashioned now?

Then if I change the file extensions on my pages I also suppose that any other links to my site to any of my other pages will then become void seeing that the extension has been changed? Is this correct? (Sorry if this seems dumb to you, I would not ask if I did not know.)

The reason that I am changing is that my hosting company SUCKS big time, and also my technical helper has left the site and I am having to replace what he did (and what he was supposed to do) with software, like the automation of the payment section with 2Checkout and my members area. Then I also need to have a shopping cart and a lot of these software packages want a unix/linux based platform or rather a platform with IonCube loaded.

I am so not quite sure what to do and I would just like some feedback and advice thank you so much.

Regards

Barry