Scope
This page describes the web hosting options available to members of the School of Informatics and Computing. 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 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. 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 SoIC, 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 SoIC and/or research group pages.
Service | URL | Usage | Contact | Advantages | Disadvantages | Getting Started |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Non-IU Hosting | Arbitrary | Arbitrary | ISP |
|
| 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... |
IU Pages |
| Personal Homepages | UITS |
|
| At IU, what is Pages and how can I publish a web page here? |
SoIC CGI/PHP Server (for Homepages) |
| Personal Homepages | SoIC |
|
| |
SoIC Wordpress Homepages |
| Personal Homepages | SoIC |
|
| How do I ask for help with a technology or facilities issue? |
SoIC Course Homepages and Syllabi Hosting |
| Course Homepages and Syllabus Uploads | SoIC |
|
| How do I upload information about classes I'm teaching? |
IU Webserve |
| Research and Project Pages | UITS |
|
| Webserve Quick Start Guide |
IU Common Hosting Environment (CHE) |
| Research and Project Pages | UITS |
|
| Consolidated Hosting Environment (CHE) Quick Start Guide |
Wordpress Hosting |
| Research and Project Pages | SoIC |
|
| How do I ask for help with a technology or facilities issue? |
SoIC CGI/PHP Server (for project pages) |
| Research and Project Pages | SoIC |
|
|
|
Dedicated Virtual Machines | Various | Research and Project Pages | SoIC |
|
| Virtual Machine Policy |
Dedicated Research Servers | Various | Research and Project Pages | SoIC |
|
| 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, SoIC controls the soic.indiana.edu domain so we can assign domains names of the form projectname.soic.indiana.edu. Here are the common domains you are likely to want to use and some considerations and rules regarding each.
- soic.indiana.edu -This domain is controlled by the School of Informatics and Computing so getting domain names of the form something.soic.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 and Computing 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 soic.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 SoIC will normally be created within the soic.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 SoIC will normally be created within the soic.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?