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Usage Guidelines
The following guidelines include information about the most common acceptable use issues. This is not a comprehensive list; projects must follow these guidelines, but are also encouraged to use common sense. When in doubt, contact us for further guidance:
- Security Considerations
- The web servers and shell servers are shared by many departments. As with any publicly-shared servers, you should consider these servers to be insecure. Please do not store sensitive or personal data on web sites, as this can lead to accidentally sharing this information to the public.
- Disk Quota
- There is no disk space limit for the web hosting service. However, if your site uses so much space as to disrupt services to other customers, we may discuss alternate options with you, such as a service fee for disk used.
- Backups
- Users are responsible for their own backups. While we encourage webmasters to make regular backups of their work, these backups should be offloaded from our servers to better provide a source to restore your own data. OIT staff maintain backups for system recovery purposes only and will (generally) not restore web site content on demand. If you have a particular need for per-request recovery, please contact us.
- CPU Usage
- Please do not use our servers for general data processing or CPU-intensive work, such as the operation of SETI or distributed.net clients. Normal document processing activities (i.e. creation and management of web site content) are acceptable.
- Bandwidth
- Some web hosting companies put a limit on the amount of content that can be served by your web site. This is not the case here; there is no data transfer limit for the web hosting service. However, webmasters are encouraged to develop web sites which are viewable by users over dial-up (i.e. limit the size of images, and keep other content down to a reasonable size).