Web Development Guidelines Resources for Creating a Web Site at Johns Hopkins
Web Guidelines Site Map

Web Hosting at Johns Hopkins

General Notes about Web Hosting

The term Web Hosting describes the process of physically storing the files that make up your web site on a web server and making your web site accessible to your audience.

The overall success of your web site can depend greatly on where it is hosted. The web hosting service you choose should support all the technologies you plan to use on your site and provide a good balance between price and performance. Johns Hopkins' web sites utilize many different classes of hosting, from completely outsourced database-driven sites to locally hosted static HTML sites.

Often web sites are developed off-line and uploaded to web servers when they are finished. It is always a good idea to be aware of the eventual web hosting environment before too much development work is done on a site to avoid conflicts and surprises. Consider this example: an outside company is hired to develop the site and they use their development servers to write the site using Active Server Pages; they finish working on the site and send it to Hopkins to be hosted, but the server at Hopkins does not support Active Server Pages because it's Unix. Costly mistakes like this can be avoided by learning about the hosting environment before any major site development is begun.

The decision on where to host your site often involves weighing flexibility, performance, and cost. More flexibility and more performance usually mandate higher costs. The free/low cost web hosting from Enterprise Services offers lower flexibility and performance because many hundreds of sites share the same environment. Departmental, dedicated, or outsourced web hosting solutions offer more but also cost more. Enterprise Services Web Hosting (http://nts.jhmi.edu/es/webhosting.cfm) is available to all members of the Johns Hopkins Institutions.

Personal Web Sites

Other Web Hosting

Quickplace
http://groupwise.jhu.edu/ - Quickplace is a web-based collaboration tool produced by Lotus that allows you to coordinate projects or publish information through quickly created web sites. The best thing about Quickplace is that you do not need to know anything about writing or programming web sites. Contact quickplace@jhmi.edu for demonstration and access.

JHCOURSE
The JHCOURSE web server is a collaborative effort between the School of Arts and Sciences and School of Engineering managed under the MSE Library Center for Educational Resources. Instructors for courses listed in the Schools of Arts and Sciences and the School of Engineering course catalogs can request course webspace.

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