Service Level statement for central web hosting.

Service Level Statement

I. OBJECTIVE

The objective of this Service Level Statement is to present a clear and concise description of the services offered by central web hosting. This statement will also define the roles and responsibilities of OIT.

II. CONTACT PROCEDURES

OIT encourages the customer to send e-mail requests, when possible, to the email account cco-web-admin@lists.umn.edu. This email address is monitored during normal weekday business hours (usually 8:00AM - 5:00PM Monday - Friday, except holidays.)

In case of emergency, for PREMIUM hosting only, the customer may contact 1-HELP at 612-301-HELP (-4357); on campus, dial 1-HELP. Please identify the call as a priority support request for central web hosting. We will respond within 1 hour of being paged for PREMIUM hosting only. See also System Status page for announcements and updates.

BASIC hosting is supported only during normal weekday business hours and "best effort" outside those hours.

OIT requires at least one primary contact, including name, email address and phone number for every individual web site. OIT will contact the primary contact(s) directly in the event there is a problem or question about an individual web site.

III. SERVICE PROVIDED AND ACCEPTABLE USE

Content:

  1. Users of central web hosting will maintain, modify and delete their own web objects and structures. OIT staff will not participate in content maintenance.
  2. Management access to content directories will be provided by dedicated servers via the SSH protocol. Use of personal x500 usernames and passwords is required. Shared or departmental accounts are not allowed.
  3. Users must comply with the University's Acceptable Use of Information Technology Resources policy. The storing and serving of private data is prohibited. Examples of private data can be found in Appendix G-1 of the policy.

Backup/Restores: OIT will perform full and incremental backups of server data for use in disaster recovery. OIT may perform file restorations upon request for a fee for PREMIUM hosting only. A typical schedule will be 90 days retention.

High Availability/Disaster Recovery: Multiple web servers, in several locations around campus, support central web hosting. An outage at one location or on one server is highly unlikely to result in a system-wide outage for both BASIC and PREMIUM. OIT will strive to ensure that central web hosting will be available 7x24x365, except during scheduled server maintenance (if any.) However, unplanned outages can occur. In the event of unscheduled downtime OIT will determine and resolve the problem. Updates and other information will be posted on System Status.

In case of a system-wide disaster involving loss of data, OIT will re-install the operating system(s) and restore data.

Security: OIT will actively scan and monitor all servers to ensure systems are secure. OIT will review and remediate any outstanding issues that are based upon those results.

Servers: OIT will set up, configure, maintain and upgrade server hardware and peripherals, including server CPUs, adapter cards, memory, hard disk arrays, tape backup units and removable storage units etc. Also, OIT will install, configure, maintain and upgrade operating system software on servers.

Server Resources and Performance:

  1. Disk Quota There is no disk space limit for the central 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.
  2. 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.
  3. Bandwidth There is no data transfer limit for the central web hosting service. However, webmasters are encouraged to develop web sites that are viewable by users over dial-up (i.e. limit the size of images, and keep other content down to a reasonable size).
  4. Performance Performance of our web hosting service is dependent on a number of factors, including the performance of the applications and pages used by your web site, those used by other sites, traffic spikes (for example, "slashdotting"), and seasonal traffic changes related to the University calendar. The central web hosting service may experience intermittent performance fluctuations, usually without major impact, due to the variations in traffic to specific web sites. We monitor the performance and traffic related to all of our services carefully and continually work to maintain high levels of quality and performance throughout our service offering.

Software: OIT will install and maintain operating system vendor supplied versions of web hosting software including, but not limited to, Apache, PHP and Perl. OIT will manage and maintain SSL certificates. OIT will install and update the cookieauth module on PREMIUM tier only. Customer is responsible for installing any specific programming language modules not available from operating system vendor.

Log Statistics and Analysis: Log statistics analysis is available from UM Web Stats. Please see UM Web Stats for instructions.