ACS's admin web server (was Re: staffing for websites)

Hi all,

Since Steve is (at least) the second person to mention it, I thought I'd
just mention the service formally (even though I don't work for CCS).

CCS's Academic Computing Services (ACS), which is part of IST, provides a
managed hosting solution for departments that what to deploy a website
but don't have the resources to manage a high-availability server.
Although I don't use the service in my current position, I have in the
past, and I can say the service is very much worth the meager $9.25/month.

You can read more about the service here:

http://acs.berkeley.edu/admin_web/

From the about page:

"The Administrative Web Server is specifically designed to
function as a robust and fast server, with maximum uptime
and network connectivity. It is not intended to be used as
a mail server. It currently runs the Stronghold Web server,
version 2.4. Appropriately licensed software can also be installed
directly by users in their Administrative Web Server accounts.
This server is monitored by ACS 24 hours a day, 7 days a week,
and is backed-up nightly."

-lucas

On Thu, 30 Oct 2003, Steve McConnell wrote:

> In Public Affairs, we manage the campus gateway site (www.berkeley.edu and its offspring), the NewsCenter suite of pages, and various and sundry smaller websites with a staff of four: an editor, a designer/producer, a writer and a manager. We all dabble in each other's specialties as well, so
> that there's a fair amount of crossover backup. We report to the director of university communications.
>
> I honestly have no current estimate of how many pages are on the various sites, only that it's in the many thousands, and adds between a handful and dozens of new ones each day.
>
> The Public Affairs web team handles page design and coding, manual content updates, graphics, usability testing (quite limited so far), quality control and most of the etc's. We also do a fair amount of the writing and most of the photography. We contract out what little DB development we've done
> so far. We have no content management system, but we do have a Perl-based, web form-driven publishing system that allows non-web writers and admin assistants within Public Affairs to publish basic text files to the website, including automatic entry into our archive pages (though not the main
> NewsCenter page - that's entirely hand-rolled in Dreamweaver). Any post-publication changes to the pages, including basic addition of simple images, are handled by the web team.
>
> We don't have anyone in Public Affairs tasked with the hardware end; production server administration is done by IS&T's Central Computing Services, while desktop support and development server administration come from University Relations' Network Computing Services.
>
> Steve McConnell
> * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
> Web news editor, UC Berkeley
> NewsCenter.berkeley.edu
>
> 510/643.7789
> scm@pa.urel.berkeley.edu
> * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
>
>
> On 27 Oct 2003, at 13:34, Sara Leavitt wrote:
>
> Marilyn,
>
> Thanks for the suggestion re including the answer to "How big is your
> unit?" and I would add "How big is your website?"
>
> Here at LHS...
>
> 4000+ pages on the site
> 80K unique visitors/month
>
> ~300 employees at LHS
> 6 Technical Services staff employees
> 1 Web Developer responsible for overall QA, server maintenance,
> database programming, updates on core site 100+ pages, design,
> training etc.
> ~6 content providers update sub-sites directly, with coaching by web developer
> occasional design assistance provided by print publications department
> occasional database programming provide by other staff programmers
>
> -Sara
>
>
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> The following was automatically added to this message by the list server:
>
> Webnet information is available at <URL:http://webnet.berkeley.edu/>.
>
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
The following was automatically added to this message by the list server:

Webnet information is available at <URL:http://webnet.berkeley.edu/>.
Received on Thu, 30 Oct 2003 10:48:23 -0800 (PST)