You are viewing an old version of this page. View the current version.

Compare with Current View Page History

« Previous Version 9 Next »

ATTENTION

This is a draft document and may contain errors and omissions.

Scope

This page describes the web hosting options provided by the School of Informatics and Computing. This includes provisions for personal homepages as well as project and research group pages. 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:

  • Personal Homepages 
       http://homes.soic.indiana.edu/username
  • Project/Research Homepages 
       http://homes.soic.indiana.edu/projectname
  • Project/Research Homepages (With SoIC Faculty Sponsorship) 
       http://projectname.soic.indiana.edu/

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.

  1. 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.
     
  2. 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.
     
  3. 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).
     
  4. 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.
     
  5. 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.
     
  6. 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.

  • No labels