School Website Hosting

[sqdge]

So, my big plan for this summer was to set up a decent school website using joomla or dotnetnuke or something. However, I've just found out that the .sch.uk address the school has been given does not support PHP or SQL. Instead it only likes ASP and MSAccess. This is a bit of a blow.

I could get the service provider (RM!) to give me PHP and SQL if the school were to pay £500 a year. Since at home I get those things for about £15 a year, and I've already got told off for spending too much this financial year, that's not an option I'm going to take.

Is this the same for other schools? Or do you get a better hosting package? I'm not the greatest fan of just re-directing people from the .sch.uk address to a different place, as I think that looks quite messy. But I might not have much choice.

Any ideas?

[webman]

Can you find alternative cheaper hosting that will support IPS tags and just change the IPS tag for your .sch.uk domain? I understand that IPS tags are the only way to handle DNS for .sch.uk domains.

That was the reason we bought a different domain for ours; Nominet (website and customer services) were very unhelpful when we wanted to set our .sch.uk domain up as it had never been done before.

We also host ours ourselves.

[Kained]

Redirection is a possibility but personally we host our site in house, its something to think about if you have the equiptment.

[plexer]

Buy some hosting that supports what you want and then ask whoever manages your dns for the domain to change the tag and dns to your new host.

If they won't do it fill out the forms online at nominet and they will force the change for you for a small fee of £10 + vat.

Voila done.

Ben

[ChrisH]

Ask for the schools team at Nominet I found them very helpful.

[ZeroHour]

Ask for the schools team at Nominet I found them very helpful.

There is a schools team?!?! since when?
When I phoned nominet I went on the PBX train from one office to another being transfered around.

What kind of internet you have sqdge? You could host it yourself.
If you buy hosting anywhere you dont need to move the whole domain name. Just get them to edit the A record for www. to your new hosters IP.

[Geoff]

You can contact the Schools Support Team at Nominet by telephoning 01865 332211 or by emailing them at schoolnames@nominet.org.uk.

[localzuk]

We host ours interanally, with our LEA controlling the DNS record for our .sch.uk domain - we just have the A records pointing here instead of RM/LEA.

[plock]

http://www.urevised.com should be able to help!

Or, as suggested above, host it internally.

[Joedetic]

Always worth hosting internally in my opinion. A LAMP box is cheap enough to setup. The only cost flaws i could see behind it are cost for change-control proceedures like getting the LEA/RBC to unblock ports. Port 80 was open by default where i was. Just register a domain name and you point it to your static IP.

If you dont have a static IP (which most schools do i think these days) i can recommend http://www.everydns.net/ They're an excellent solution to dynamic IP addresses.

[Adam]

I agree with the above, in all aspect except - you want a wimp box really (windows, iis, mysql, php for the un-initiated)

Troll, troll, troll

Adam

[Joedetic]

WIMP....no. The sucess an performance rates for PHP on IIS have always been pittiful when ever I or anyone else I know has tried it...except for one person i suspect to have been lying because of how his face went bright red.

If you want to go down the windows route use XAMPP (or some kind of WAMP package) that utilises apache which, in my opinion, has much better support for things like mysql and php and perl and all sorts of other lovely stuff.

[Geoff]

Windows sucks at context switching. Thus the performance of WIMP/WAMP is dire compared to LAMP on equivelent hardware.

[webman]

If you absolutely have to use Windows, I recommend the WAMP server package.

[Adam]

Not that I'm taking my troll too seriously or anything, but for most schools wanting a reasonbly simple data-driven extension of the usual brochure site, WIMP gives a fairly idiot proof soution. of course WAMP and LAMP do offer performance improvements, but be honest - are most school really going to notice the difference? If you're lucky enough to be proficient with linux type things, then good for you. Otherwise, I think WIMP is a perfectly acceptable platform for a school web site - and is a hell of a lot simpler to implement for a windows user.

count to 10 before replying!

Adam