School website: to host or not to host?

cojobt

Hi,

First off I'll say I'm not sure if this is the correct forum, so apologies if not...

I've recently been given the task of redeveloping the website for the secondary school where I work. We have a rather dull, not very dynamic site hosted by scoilnet for free. I also set up the school blog last year which uses Wordpress, again hosted by scoilnet.

Now that I've been given the task and a little bit of extra time to work on the whole thing, I'm looking at options for redesigning/building the site from the ground up. To that end, one of the first things I'm trying to establish is whether we would be better to continue to use scoilnet's rather limited webhosting services, move to another, paid-for webhosting service, or host the site in school. The network guy in the school tells me that once our 100MB net connection comes online in a few weeks, we will have sufficient bandwidth to host our own site, and storage is not a problem.

The question is, do I/we want to host our own pages? These will include a number of static pages with general school info, some downloadable documents, probably a few pages of photos (which will constantly expand - I find Picasa's free service too small for one year's photos), and the blog.

Hosting will give us more control and space, but at what cost? Will maintenance be a nightmarish challenge? Is it necessary? Is it easy to incorporate, say, a Wordpress blog into a static, self-hosted website?

I have the option of simply redesigning the blog, using Wordpress online (not downloading Wordpress), setting up the blog page as the school front page, then having a number of static pages for everything else, and have all this hosted on scoilnet. The problem there is the wordpress templates are limited, we don't get access to all the same tools, and although scoilnet give us a fair bit of space but hosting photos is problematic.

What we're going to need are....
- static information pages
- important document/form downloads (pdf, doc)
- photo galleries
- live, regularly updated (weekly, possibly daily) blog

What we're going to consider is...
- moodle, or any other interactive learning/teaching resource where the school website becomes a useful resource for all aspects of teaching and learning in the school.


In terms of my own experience, I have a fair bit of knowledge at this stage of Wordpress online, I have basic HTML knowledge but this is far out of date at this stage, and some Dreamweaver experience (about 10 years ago). I have set up a couple of wordpress blogs, and a couple of very basic websites (now migrated to wordpress).

I'm willing to learn, but I'm not a paid designer/technician, so while it's attractive to say we're going to have the most exciting, dynamic, all-singing, all-dancing website, the reality is ease of use, easy updating and maintenance are more important.

Ok, that's a mouthful. Any advice will be considered and appreciated.


Thanks,

cojobt

dalta5billion

Depends if the 100 Mbit (small is 100/100, symmetrical or not. It might be 100/10, 10 Mbit upload. Which means a roughly 2.2 Megabyte upload/second. Bear in mind that the school will be simultaneously using the connection for other things as well.

All in all, I'd go remote hosted on [a type of tiny server] (free for a year with well known company) with a cloudflare-like service protecting against malicious students.

Or, if the connection to the school is decent, host it in school also with cloudflare-like service acting as a cache, reducing usage of your connection.

Sorry for not recommending hosting places, it's not allowed here unfortunately.

tricky D

I'd advise you to run a mile from hosting it in the school. Far too much maintenance and security overhead for just a single site.

A quick cost benefit analysis also says it's far more economical to just get a good hosting package.

daymobrew

tricky D wrote: »

I'd advise you to run a mile from hosting it in the school. Far too much maintenance and security overhead for just a single site.

A quick cost benefit analysis also says it's far more economical to just get a good hosting package.

I completely agree.

A paid for shared hosting account will cost around 60 euro per year. The domain name is ~20/year for .ie and less than 10/year for .com.

You could easily install WordPress and Moodle on such a site.

ermahgerd

Host it remotely + Wordpress CMS + install Moodle if needed would be my plan.

cojobt

ermahgerd wrote: »

Host it remotely + Wordpress CMS + install Moodle if needed would be my plan.

Hmmm...from what I've read today and these posts it seems clear that webhosting is the way to go. Having looked a little at scoilnet's service, they don't have any upload limit, but I wonder if they expected a blog and moodle to be hosted.

The main site with blog is the priority I suppose. Moodle is a long-finger project, which may be a never ending dark tunnel in reality!

ermahgerd

Yeah I was talking about webhosting. I've a package on reg365 I use myself that could support such a project and it's something like €5 per month. Much rather do that than go through the hassle of hosting it locally.