What are some ways to host my personal website?

The default URL for a UIC Google Site is https://sites.google.com/a/uic.edu/site, where site is the name you give your Google Site.

Custom URLs are available for the following groups:

• Student organizations: site.org.uic.edu
• Research Labs: site.labs.uic.edu
• Class websites: site.class.uic.edu
• Personal websites: NetID.gsites.uic.edu

Google Sites can only be accessed from the web; they are inaccessible via SSH or SFTP.

This service is available to UIC students, faculty and staff, and is funded by the University. There are no direct costs to clients.

GitHub Pages

GitHub Pages is a static site hosting service that takes HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files straight from a repository on GitHub, optionally runs the files through a build process, and publishes a website. You can find more information about this offering at About GitHub Pages. A valid UIC primary NetID and common password are required to create a GitHub account and to access the University GitHub Enterprise account.

Examples of GitHub Pages sites are available in the GitHub Pages examples collection.

Features include: 

• Single sign-on using your UIC NetID and common password 
• Service level agreement for 99.95% monthly uptime
• Supports HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
• Ideal for static sites
• Hosting on either GitHub's github.io domain or your own custom domain. See Configuring a custom domain for your GitHub Pages site.
• Organization owners can disable the publication of GitHub Pages sites from the organization's repositories. For more information, see Managing the publication of GitHub Pages sites for your organization.
• Public or private sites. See Changing the visibility of your GitHub Pages site.

This service is available to UIC students, faculty and staff, and is funded by the University. There are no direct costs to clients.

Microsoft Azure 

Microsoft Azure is an ever-expanding set of cloud services to help UIC innovate and meet your organizational needs. It’s the freedom to build, manage, and deploy applications on a massive, global network using your favorite tools and frameworks.

Azure products and services include:

• Compute: These services enable a user to deploy and manage virtual machines (VMs), containers and batch processing, as well as support remote application access.
• Web: These services support the development and deployment of web applications, and also offer features for search, content delivery, application programming interface management, notification and reporting.
• Data storage: This category of services provides scalable cloud storage for structured and unstructured data and also supports big data projects, persistent storage (for containers) and archival storage.
• Analytics: These services provide distributed analytics and storage, as well as features for real-time analytics, big data analytics, data lakes, machine learning, business intelligence (BI), internet of things data streams and data warehousing.
• Networking: This group includes virtual networks, dedicated connections and gateways, as well as services for traffic management and diagnostics, load balancing, domain name system (DNS) hosting, and network protection against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.
• Media and content delivery network (CDN): These services include on-demand streaming, digital rights protection, encoding, media playback, and indexing.
• Hybrid integration: These are services for server backup, site recovery and connecting private and public clouds.
• Identity and access management (IAM): These offerings ensure only authorized users can access Azure services, and help protect encryption keys and other sensitive information in the cloud. Services include support for Azure Active Directory and multifactor authentication (MFA).

This service is available to UIC faculty and staff, and is Self-Supported. Costs vary based on how the service is used.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a secure cloud services platform that offers services such as: compute power, database storage, content delivery, and other functionality to help UIC innovate and meet organizational needs. Technology Solutions is continuing to work on final approval for HIPAA data storage and usage in AWS with the CISPO. In the meantime, the AWS computing service offering is now generally available for production data at UIC. If you have any questions please ask us.

AWS allows you to do the following:

• Run web and application servers in the cloud to host dynamic websites.
• Securely store all your files on the cloud so you can access them from anywhere.
• Use managed databases like MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle or SQL Server to store information.
• Deliver static and dynamic files quickly around the world using a Content Delivery Network (CDN).
• Send bulk email.

This service is available to UIC faculty and staff, and is Self-Supported. Costs vary based on how the service is used.