Home | Mail | Web | Shell | File | MailDomain | WebDomain | AUP | Policies

Web Domain Hosting Info

If you own a domain name, UofR.net can the web site for your domain. Your site will have all the capabilities of a regular UofR.net web site, including CGI, PHP, and server-side includes.

Applying

To apply for web domain hosting, send an email to sysadmin at uofr dot net with the following information:

• Your UofR.net login name
• Your domain name
• The path of the directory that will contain the web files for the domain:
  • this should not be your ~/www directory or a subdirectory of your ~/www directory
  • if you leave this out, we'll create one for you

We will drop you an email to let you know that your hosting is ready to go.

DNS Configuration

After hosting is set up, you have to set the corresponding domain records to point to our server. The catch here is that UofR.net has a dynamic IP address. If your DNS provider allows you to use CNAME records for your base domain, you can say something like:

    yourdomain.org. IN CNAME uofr.net.
www.yourdomain.org. IN CNAME uofr.net.

(I'm using zonefile format here. Your DNS provider will probably have another way for you to enter data.)

This way if our IP changes you'll be all set. However, some providers don't, and there are situations where you might not want to do it. (Some poorly-behaving MTAs get confused when an MX record points to a CNAME.)

The second option is to set it up with an A record for your base domain, and change it manually when our IP changes:

    yourdomain.org. IN A     50.116.51.30
www.yourdomain.org. IN CNAME yourdomain.org.

If you use a DNS provider that supports dynamic updates, and feel comfortable giving us your login information, we can do automatic IP updates for you. We use ddclient for updates. It supports DynDNS.org, Hammernode, Zoneedit, EasyDNS, and any other service that uses the same protocol as one of those.

Customizing

Customize your web site by placing files in your domain directory. See also Web Features for a list of supported features.