Hey guys,

I am about ready to install Slackware onto my laptop and I was wondering about something. Is it possible to get a web hosting service online and somehow install programs on it so I can download files to it as if I was actually there? The main thing is I want to use their bandwidth and download directly to the server, and then later get it from my laptop at home. Is this possible with Slackware? If so, what are some basic things that I should learn to do?

You don't NEED slackware to install programs to a remote server. You can use a shell program, putty comes to mind, to shell in to the remote site, and run commands through the shell. That's if you have shell access to your hosting service. Another problem would be if your hosting service allowed binary executions on their servers. If you got both, then just read the dox that came with whatever *nix program you're trying to run, and make sure it can run as a normal user. I HIGHLY doubt a hosting company would allow you to edit their server configuration files.

Call me crazy for asking this ...

If the limitation is your bandwidth at home, then it wouldn't matter whether you downloaded them directly from the Internet to your laptop or from your web hosting service, right?

Unless I'm missing something here.

At the moment, I cant have my laptop running 24/7. So I need a permanently on connection to be downloading for me during my computers downtime.

You can use wget (if it is installed on the server).
The problem is programs run in user space,
you need to be login to run the program.

Lets say you ssh to the server and
wget http://server.com/download/this.mine

The moment you quit the ssh session, your program will quit running.

Unless, you have access to crontab. (Work around). So you can have a script file which says

#!/bin/sh
wget -c http://server.com/download/this.mine

and make the crontab to execute the script at sometime you want it to be.

PLEASE CHECK WITH YOUR HOSTING COMPANY. You may get your account terminated if you mess around.

Maybe we are missing something here. Is the server yours? I mean at a place where you can physically access it at certain point of time? If yes, then you are alright. If the only way to access the server you are talking about is through Internet connection. THEN you have a serious problem.

Point A is the content original site
Point B is your server
Point C is your laptop

What you are asking is to move content from Point A to Point B. (no problem, both dedicated connection)
Moving from Point B to Point C would also take a long time if you have slow Internet connection trying to get huge file.

This has also been pointed out by Tino27