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This is a draft document and may contain errors and omissions. |
Scope
This page describes the web hosting options available to members of the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering. The services presented here include IU/UITS offerings available to all members of the IU community as well as those provided by the School of Informatics and Computing, Computing, and Engineering for use by members of our school. This includes provisions for personal homepages as well as project, course, and research group pages. You can create your own homepage using several of the web hosting options described below using the Homepage Management Page. Please contact the systems staff if you need help setting up any of these options.
Naming Conventions
The normal naming conventions/URLs are as follows:
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In your request, please include the URL and hosting option you prefer.
Hosting Options Matrix
There are a lot of web hosting options at your disposal, including SICE, IU/UITS, and non-IU options. The table below attempts to summarize the available options and give the highlights of the advantages and disadvantages of each service. Note that some are appropriate for what are commonly called personal homepages and some are geared toward non-personal SICE and/or research group pages.
| Service | URL | Usage | Contact | Advantages | Disadvantages | Getting Started |
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| Non-IU Hosting | Arbitrary | Arbitrary | ISP |
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| Contact the ISP managing the desired service. There are literally thousands of web hosting options out there supporting wordpress, drupal, joomla, php, ASP.NET, Ruby on Rails, etc. Once you have a non-IU web page, you can register it so you also have a http://homes. |
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sice.indiana.edu/username |
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url via the Homepage Management Page | ||||||
| IU Blogs |
| Blog | UITS |
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| Getting Started with IU Blogs |
| IU Pages |
| Personal Homepages | UITS |
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| At IU, what is Pages and how can I publish a web page here? |
| SICE CGI/PHP Server (for Homepages) |
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| Personal Homepages | SICE |
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This service has been deprecated and is not available for new users. Please use the IU Blogs Wordpress service listed above. | |||
| SICE Course Homepages and Syllabus Hosting |
| Course Homepages and Syllabus Uploads | SICE |
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| How do I upload information about classes I'm teaching? |
| IU Webserve |
| Research and Project Pages | UITS |
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| Webserve Quick Start Guide |
| IU Common Hosting Environment (CHE) |
| Research and Project Pages | UITS |
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| Consolidated Hosting Environment (CHE) Quick Start Guide |
| IU Enterprise Confluence |
| Research and Project Pages | UITS |
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| What is the IU Enterprise Confluence? |
| Wordpress Hosting |
| Research and Project Pages | SICE |
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| How do I ask for help with a technology or facilities issue? |
| SICE CGI/PHP Server (for project pages) |
| Research and Project Pages | SICE |
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| Dedicated Virtual Machines | Various | Research and Project Pages | SICE |
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| Virtual Machine Policy |
| Dedicated Research Servers | Various | Research and Project Pages | SICE |
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| How do I ask for help with a technology or facilities issue? |
URL/Domain Naming Convention Notes
URLs will include a domain name that will fall under one of several jurisdictions. For example, SICE controls the sice.indiana.edu domain so we can assign domains names of the form projectname.sice.indiana.edu. Here are the common domains you are likely to want to use and some considerations and rules regarding each.
- sice.indiana.edu -This domain is controlled by the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering so getting domain names of the form something.sice.indiana.edu is a relatively simple matter. As noted in the matrix above, we can host sites in this domain using a number of different hosting services within IU.
- cs.indiana.edu/ils.indiana.edu/informatics.indiana.edu/engineering.indiana.edu - These domains are also controlled by the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering and URLs using these domains only require approval by the head of the corresponding division.
- indiana.edu - Sites within the top level indiana.edu domain (as opposed to the sice.indiana.edu domain) are reserved for projects that span multiple schools, departments, or organizations on the Bloomington campus. A project that exists completely within the SICE will normally be created within the sice.indiana.edu domain. To request a domain within indiana.edu, the sponsoring faculty member must write a short justification describing the inter-unit nature of the project. We will submit this to UITS for approval.
- iu.edu - Sites within the top level iu.edu domain are reserved for projects that span multiple IU campuses. A project that exists completely within the SICE will normally be created within the sice.indiana.edu domain and projects that span multiple units on the Bloomington campus will normally be created within the indiana.edu domain. To request a domain within iu.edu, the sponsoring faculty member must write a short justification describing the inter-campus nature of the project. We will submit this to UITS for approval.
- .org - The .org namespace is not controlled by IU so you are free to get names within the .org domain using non-IU hosting services. However, if you want to set up a .org and have the DNS and/or web pages hosted at IU then you have to get approval from IU Communications as detailed in the UITS KB page At IU, what are the DNS policies?
- .com and other commercial domains - The hosting of commercial domains (eg. .com) at IU is generally not permitted but there are always exceptions. For more information, see the UITS KB page At IU, what are the DNS policies?
You can use any of the hosting options described below with these URLs.
Note that soic.indiana.edu is the new domain for the school and is preferred over the legacy cs.indiana.edu and informatics.indiana.edu domains.
Hosting Options
A number of hosting options are available within the school, each with its own advantages.
- Wordpress and Drupal - Wordpress and Drupal are popular content management systems for building web sites. Both offer a wide range of features like blogs, themes, forums, customizable user roles, and web-based administration. These options are available for faculty, staff, graduate students, and research/project sites and are good options for anyone wanting a full-featured content management system. These services are managed by the systems staff but users have full control over the content of their sites.
- HTML Hosting - You are provided with a directory into which you can publish your html. This lets you use any html web site creation package (such as Dreamweaver or Expression Web) or you can write your own html code. This option does not provide any type of content management system so you will either have to use some other package to do this or you can do it manually. Access to the directory will be via ssh/scp/sftp and most publication packages support publication using this mechanism. This option supports static html hosting only so does not support PHP or CGI.
- CGI/PHP Hosting (Linux) - If you need PHP or general CGI support, then this option may meet your needs. This is similar to the HTML Hosting option but includes support for PHP (executing in safe-mode) as well as CGI using the scripting language of your choice (perl, python, ruby, etc). While this option provides the most power and highest degree of customization, it is not recommended for anyone without experience working in a Linux environment. In addition to writing your own code, you can also use this option if you need support for 3rd-party PHP or CGI-based applications (such as mediawiki, gallery, geeklog, etc).
- IIS/ASP.NET Hosting (Windows) - If you require ASP.NET support then we can provide space on a Windows server running IIS, with faculty sponsorship. We ask that you use this option only if your application relies on ASP.NET.
- Group-owned Server - If you have your own server where you can run something like apache, you can host your own site, with faculty sponsorship. We can set up the DNS records for you and you can manage the site yourself. This can be done on a system that the SoIC staff is managing or a system you manage yourself.
- Hosted Server - If hosting your site using one of the above services is not practical, it is possible for us to set up a virtual machine that either we can manage for you or you can manage yourself, with faculty sponsorship. Bear in mind that this option typically takes significantly more staff resources than any of the above options, so we will have to negotiate a support model that doesn't put undue burden on the systems staff.
In addition to these school-provided options, there are other central IU campus-wide options including Mypage, Webserve, and Virtual Machine Hosting.