Web Hosting

IMSS offers a variety of options for hosting your office, lab, or personal web site:

Caltech Sites is a content management system that allows you to quickly and easily create a web site using the standard Caltech brand. You will not need to do any coding – just upload images into the site and compose your content in our rich text editor.

Sites on our Caltech Sites platform are available automatically to faculty, departments, campus organizations, and student clubs; all others, please inquire.

Features

• Ability to login with your access.caltech credentials (name@caltech.edu)
• Option to use virtual hostnames such as http://groupname.caltech.edu
• Provides version control, drafts, revisions, moderation
• Ability to create pages (login required, password protected, or campus IPs only) for internal departmental pages
• Links easily to rich content content such as:
  • Event feed from master calendar
  • News feed from www.caltech.edu
  • Video embeds from YouTube and Vimeo
  • WuFoo form embedding

Cost: Free

Caltech Sites User Guide

To see all the available features, please visit: https://sites.caltech.edu To request a site, please fill out this form.

If you have an access.caltech account, Unix Cluster Web Hosting is currently included as a free service. However, we encourage new sites to use either the Caltech Sites CMS or our Dynamic Web Sites option.

Unix Cluster Web Hosting includes:

• Up to 1GB web hosting space free; additional space available for $0.33/month/GB
• Option to use virtual hostnames such as http://groupname.caltech.edu; please see our virtual hosts page for details. NOTE: this will not include an SSL certificate for groupname.caltech.edu. For modern hosting, please use Caltech Sites or our Dynamic Web Sites option instead.
• Access controls using .htaccess files; please see our access control page for details

For information about how to use the Unix Cluster please see Web Hosting on the Unix Cluster and Web Publishing from MacOS.

This is similar to Static Web Sites and includes these additional free features:

• scripting languages for dynamic pages: JavaScript, PERL, PHP
• secure pages (https) with managed SSL certificate
• 5 GB of storage
• doesn't require setting up a group account for a lab/club,  but instead can be edited by whatever list of users you choose
  

To request a Dynamic Web Site, e-mail unix-admins@caltech.edu with the name of the site, a list of all the users who should be allowed to edit it, and the name of one person who will be the owner responsible for the site.

For information about how to use these dynamic web sites, please see Managing Your Dynamic Web Site.

WordPress is another option for departments, labs, or individual researchers who like to build their sites with unique themes.

Starting February 2024, IMSS is no longer creating new WordPress sites.

Visit WordPress to learn more about their product offerings and pricing options.

For existing WordPress user questions, contact us at help@caltech.edu

Wikis are most commonly used for discussion, collaboration, or for collaboratively maintaining documentation. IMSS offers wiki sites using the MediaWiki platform which powers Wikipedia. Media wikis are available to labs, research groups, administrative departments.

IMSS-hosted wikis come with:

• 5 Gb storage
• Your own groupname.caltech.edu domain name
• Manage your own user access for Caltech and non-Caltech users
• Nightly backups

Cost: $15/month for each site.

To request a wiki, please email us at help@caltech.edu.

SharePoint is a collaboration, information sharing, and document management service. SharePoint may be a good choice for you if you want a team site for documents, calendar events, links, discussion boards, tasks, blogs, wikis, etc. SharePoint integrates with Office Online; edit Word, OneNote, PowerPoint and Excel documents in a browser. SharePoint provides version control on documents, pages, and lists and granular permissions that can be set at almost any level within a site.

IMSS's free SharePoint offering includes:

• Basic requirements gathering
• Basic setup
• 100GB of storage for communications, collaboration, and files

Additional Options:

• Increased Storage: Additional storage may be purchased in 50GB increments for $60 per year. A minimum one year commitment is required.
• Advanced Consulting: $100 per hour.

To request a SharePoint site please go to https://help.caltech.edu (select request type: IMSS > Office 365 > SharePoint > Request a New SharePoint Site). One of our SharePoint analysts will get in touch with you to gather requirements for your site. To prepare for the site requirements meeting we will organize with your team, please review the SharePoint Site Request Questionnaire.

Virtual Machines

IMSS uses "virtual machine" (VM) technology on high-powered clusters of Dell servers, allowing us to build individualized hosting environments to fit your application needs. We employ industry-standard best practices: centralized security management, automated patch management, system monitoring and regular backups (nearline disk and offsite tape).

Premium Web Hosting

Support for almost all application platforms on a dedicated VM.

• Cost: $50/month plus one-time $50 SSL Certificate setup
• Disk Space: 5GB standard (additional space available at $0.33/month per 1GB)
• Memory (RAM): 512MB standard (additional RAM available at $10/month per 512MB)
• Remote Access Methods: File Share (Windows); SCP (Linux)

A La Carte Services

We offer a la carte services such as:

• Managed Database Instances: $15/month for each 5GB MySQL or MS SQL database.
• Additional Disk & Database Space: $0.33/month per 1GB
• Additional Memory (RAM): $10/month per 512MB
• FTP Access: $5/month for every 3 accounts
• SSL Certificate Management: $50/year per certificate
• Other Managed Applications: Starting at $10/month
• Advanced Configuration & Data Recovery: Available through IMSS' Hourly Service

For Further Information

If you would like further information about these services, please email us at help@caltech.edu.

Booked Scheduler helps organizations and groups of all sizes efficiently manage, book, and track resources of any type. There are multiple schedule views and searching tools for users to quickly find available times for the resources they need.

Booked Scheduler sites are available to labs, research groups, administrative departments.

IMSS-hosted Booked Scheduler sites come with:

• 5 Gb storage
• Your own groupname.caltech.edu domain name
• User access for Caltech groups via access.caltech credentials.
• Nightly backups
• Cost: $15/month for each site.

To request a Booked Scheduler site, please email us at help@caltech.edu.