First of all, you don't comminicate with a database through an ftp server. Most databases will let you comminicate through a port. Also, if this you first go at a web application with a database backend, I would stay away from ASP and anthing else Microsoft. PHP is a much more popular and technically better language then ASP. There are two good, open source and free databases. PostgreSQL and MySQL. And the webserver Apache is free and infinitely better than IIS.
I have built ASP applications talking to Access and MS-SQL databases. They were always havng some sort of technical issue. More often than not, the problem would be the connection to the database would be lost and a reboot of the server was the only fix. The 3 R's of Microsoft computing, restart, reboot or reload.
A LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) setup will run quite reliably. It is all open source and there is plenty of help out there for newbies.
