Web Hosting Services

Custom websites which cannot be accommodated within eCommons can be hosted on our web servers. The hosting environments available include Microsoft IIS and Apache. We also offer hosting for sites which require Web Application services such as ASP or PHP. See the Website Application Hosting page for more details.

Website Hosting Service Details

Website Hosting Qualifications/Eligibility
Individuals or departments which are directly affiliated with HMS or HSDM may qualify to make use of the HMS web hosting facilities. Site sponsors must show a direct connection to the community, and must show that the related content is relevant to the mission of the community.

Website Hosting Policies & Procedures
What the client is expected to provide

Web design and content provided by owner
The client is responsible for providing all web content for the site. The Messaging &
Database Group is not responsible for any coding or design of the client's site.
Use of staging servers
All content will be posted to a staging server for final testing, using SSH technology.
The client will request that the site be posted to production after ensuring the
functionality of any changes or additions.
Ownership of copyright for information posted
The client is responsible for ensuring that they either own the content or have legal
permission to use it.

Acceptable material posting policies
The content of the site to be hosted must have a direct relation to HMS or HSDM
academics, and must be approved by the Office of Communications and External Relations.

Content approval requirements
All content must be approved by the HMS Public Affairs department before it may be
posted to the Web. Review the HMS Web Site Guidelines for details.

Benefits of HMS IT Website Hosting

Web Pages Statistics
Web site use statistics are analyzed and made available for reporting. See the IT
Website Traffic Reporting Service web page for further details.
Central Administration
Sites are administered and monitored by IT. The servers are within the HMS
network security umbrella, and are scanned for viruses and kept up-to-date with the
latest security advisories.
Daily Backups
All web sites are backed up on a daily basis. Up to one month's historical backups
are available for restoration if needed.
High Availability
Many of our web servers are configured with backup sites which share the web
traffic load and provide redundancy in case a server fails.
Full-time Site Monitoring
Sites are electronically monitored, and IT personnel are paged automatically should
a server or site fail.
Disk Space
HMS IT offers up to 100Mb of disk space per site.

Website Hosting Technical Details

There are two different Harvard Medical School Web Hosting platforms:

Microsoft Windows with IIS
For Windows hosting, we provide Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) version
5 running on Windows 2000 Advanced Server. The machines are located behind a
firewall, and are regularly updated with the appropriate security patches and
continuously scanned for viruses. In Microsoft's words, "Internet Information
Services (IIS) 5.0 is a powerful Web server that provides a highly reliable,
manageable, and scalable Web application infrastructure for all versions of Windows
2000 Server."

Information about these technologies can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/iis
and http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000.
Debian Linux with Apache
For Linux hosting, we provide Apache running on Debian Linux. The machines are
secured, and are regularly updated with the appropriate security patches and
continuously scanned for viruses.. In their own words, "The Debian Project is an
association of individuals who have made common cause to create a free operating
system. This operating system that we have created is called Debian GNU/Linux, or
simply Debian for short." As for Apache, "The Apache HTTP Server Project is an
effort to develop and maintain an open-source HTTP server for modern operating
systems including UNIX and Windows NT. The goal of this project is to provide a
secure, efficient and extensible server that provides HTTP services in sync with the
current HTTP standards. Apache has been the most popular web server on the
Internet since April of 1996."

For more information about this Linux/Apache web hosting service, please refer to the Orchestra Wiki
For more information on Debian and Apache generally, see http://www.debian.org or http://www.apache.org.