The University of Georgia's central IT department, EITS, has two general offerings for web hosting. For students, we offer static HTML hosting on load-balanced Apache web servers which mount content on Novell Cluster Services via NFS; BTW, we hope to change this architecture soon. For departments, faculty, and student organizations, we offer static HMTL, CGI (via suexec), and PHP (via suexec+fastcgi) on load-balanced Apache web servers. The shared NFS storage is not currently redundant. We offer distinct sub-environments for the development cycle: dev, staging, and production. We offer MySQL using a multi-master configuration. We are hoping to bolster our storage redundancy with glusterfs. We also plan to roll out Tomcat hosting any time now. We are trying to balance features, redundancy, and simplicity. Redundancy and features are crowding out simplicity right now.
Before we deploy gluster as a storage backend, we wanted to poll peer institutions about thier hosting environments. Your use of gluster, other cluster filesystem, or decision not to use such is of particular interest. But, while we're asking questions, we'd like to get a general sense of your central hosting offerings. 1. Does central IT at your University offer web hosting to departments, committees, or similar affiliates? 2. Does central IT at your University offer web hosting to students or student organizations? If so, are the offerings the same as those offered to departments? Could you briefly any difference in the environments offered? 3. What operating systems do you use for hosting? 4. Which programming languages do you host (i.e. PHP, ASP, RoR, JSP)? 5. Are your web servers load-balanced? How? 6. Are your storage backends redundant? How? Have you tried glusterfs for any purpose or decided against its use for any reason? 7. Which databases do you offer? What redundancy do you have for those servers? 8. Do you manage hosting accounts with a commercial tool, such as Plesk? Which one? 9. Do you offer a development and/or staging environment? 10. Do you have any other comments on your environment, such as off-site redundancy or use of a cloud provider like Ec2? 11. Do you charge a fee for any of your web hosting services? 12. What are your single points of failure, if any? 13. What is the approximate enrollment at your university? How many fac/staff? 14. May I compile your reply to share with the LOPSA list? Thanks in advance for any replies. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
