UWIC DFIM - Nick Gerrard

Progress Blog - Professional Practice Module Pt. 2

Wednesday 31st Jan

Recieved an email back from Greg who was Stuart's suggested contact for a webhost quoting a price of £50 per year for a massive amount of storage. I sent an email to Paul Wilgeroth in a bid to persuade him to ok the money so I really move forward with this. The email said;

Hi Paul,

I've looked into whether the university servers can support the
necessary script (PHP or mySQL) in order to produce the kind of site
we spoke about and unfortunately they definitively do not. Stuart
suggested a trusted web host that could host the site for us and he
has quoted me £50 for a years usage of very large amount of space.
2.5gb with a 20gb a day transfer capability. I realise that we would
ideally avoid this cost but without this kind of server I could only
deliver a static HTML site which would be very awkward to maintain and
update. Additionally free space on the external host could be shared
out amongst students for personal websites and so on. Please let me
know what you think as soon as you can and I'll do my best.

Thanks a lot

Nick Gerrard


I also finished the three scamps ready to send although I'm waiting for a reply back about the hosting first. They are all inspired in different ways about the nature of the art and design faculty. My favourite is the grey one with the brightly coloured letters as it has a certain gravitas and sophistication but is very visually interesting. The sketchbook style one is a bit wild but I really wanted to see how it would look as sketchbooks are a unifying factor of all our courses and are the birthplace of many of our ideas.

Greg Turners's reply to my enquiry;

Hi Nick,

Wordpress isn't forum software, it's blog software. Having said that,
it doesn't matter from the point of view of hosting which software
you use. I can install Wordpress or phpbb for you (unless it is a
course requirement to install it yourself!).

How much space you need depends on how many users you expect. You'll
easily be able to get started with 2Gb space and 20Gb monthly
transfer, which is £50/year, plus domain name fees (max £15/year for
yourdomain.com). If you regularly go over this, then we'll look at it
again.

Cheers,

Greg.

I had explained that the university servers wouldn't support forum software, which was a mistake he was quick to point out!

posted by nick_gerrard @ 9:02 AM