Types of Web Hosting at UNI
This guide focuses on shared web hosting. If you are looking for information about a dedicated server, either physical or virtual, run in UNI's infrastructure, please see this page: Dedicated Web Server Hosting
Comparison
All of the listed options are hosted at University of Northern Iowa in our datacenter. The servers and infrastructure surrounding them are redundant and aside from planned maintenance or service outages outside of our control, you can expect your website to be online at all times.
Type | Description | Support Links |
|---|---|---|
Drupal - Multisite | Most sites at UNI are created and managed centrally within this infrastructure. These sites are maintained almost entirely by the IT Client Services web team. | |
Drupal - Individual Site | This is a standalone Drupal site. Most commonly this will be in the domain name space of https://sites.uni.edu/<username>. This service is intended for people who have likely worked with Drupal before and would like a personal site or a site for a group on campus. These sites will be monitored and updated automatically when hosted on UNI resources. | |
Wordpress | Wordpress sites are good for more basic individual sites, but can be limited when used in a group scenario. When using Wordpress on UNI hosting resources it will be updated and plugins utilized will be monitored for security purposes. | |
Static/Empty | For sites that are either built using HTML/CSS/PHP/JavaScript from scratch or using a static site tool/manager you may want a just an empty directory to upload files to. MySQL database access can be provided as well. Some, but not all special integrations can be accommodated. Note: Requests for internet-facing personal web hosting will only be allowed if the website is directly related to teaching and/or research for UNI employed faculty. |
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Recommendations
Often a site is undertaken with the best intentions by a group, but as students graduate or programs change they are left, abandoned. Please try to have a long term view when you start a project like this.
For constantly evolving teams please avoid custom code as it becomes harder to maintain. Stick with an easier to pickup application, like Drupal or Wordpress.
If you are looking for a project site to "show off", consider a static site – they can be more interesting than they might sound at first!
Glossary
Content Management System: The tool or application that you will log into to manage the pages of a website.