Newbie questions - please humour me!

First of all, hey guys - my first post on these forums!

If you're at all interested in this sort of thing, I'm a 21 year old engineering student at oxford university. I have an understanding of several programming languages, but little experience in most of them. However I am very willing to learn.

I have come here seeking advice and help building a website, with a few very fundamental questions, and other rather case-specific ones.

First of all, I shall outline the plan for my site, so that hopefully you're able to answer my questions as you read them. I have put the main features of the site in bold.

~~~I understand this is a very ambitious plan, and anticipate spending a large amount of time on it~~~

The site is planned to be a means of arranging online events for players of an MMORPG (everquest 2). If you haven't groaned and pressed the back button yet, thank you!

The idea is, players (site visitors) will be able to register and log into the site using a username and password. There will be two main areas, an events page and a characters/account page. Once logged in, visitors should have the ability to add characters to their profile. Each character will have several properties (level, class, equipment status) editable by the user, and 2 that are editable only by an administrator. The events page will contain a list of events each with several properties (zone, time, date) editable only by administrator, followed by a list of characters (and their level/class) who will be attending. Depending on the status of the event (open / invite only / full) also set by an administrator users will be able to sign themselves up for the raid, or request an invite (could send an email notification or private message to an admin). The admin should have the power to delete events, and remove players from events.

Other more simple areas of the site will be a news page and a forum (will probably use phpbb).

This is the order in which I expect to develop the site:

1. Main (news) page and structure (i.e. links to and from other pages, but blank other than that).
2. News script
3. Login script
4. Add character script
5. My account page + list of characters
6. Add event script
7. Events page with list of events
8. Join event script
9. Request invite script

My questions:

1. Is this a good order to do things & is everything I have listed feasible?
2. Which scripting language does this particularly lend itself to, if any?
3. Is one database sufficient (I assume one database can contain several tables?)?
4. When selecting a web hosting service, what features will I need to make sure I have available?
5. Would you recommend a particular web host? (ideal budget under £50 per year).
6. Encryption - what will I need to encrypt, and is this trivial to do?
7. Are there any really excellent web tutorials or books that you recommend I read/buy that will help me to learn and implement your selected scripting language without having to post too many more irritating sets of questions on these boards?

EDIT: Also is there a good editor that will make things easier to hand code than just using notepad?

Thank you very much for any replies, and thank you for reading this far!

Redders.