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Website Hosting

Prior to 2023 the Palaeontological Association provided a website hosting service on its servers for palaeontological resources,  societies, and associations that fall within our charitable aims.

Server End of Life

In 2023 The Palaeontological Association’s server is reaching the end of its life, and will be obsolete within the next six months. In response, the PalAss Council discussed at length how to proceed, and has voted to cease offering direct hosting services in the future. In large part this decision reflects changes in the online landscape since the Association started offering this service. Today it is far easier to obtain hosting for popular content management systems in general, and setting up and using these requires less expertise today than it did even a decade ago. In addition, the Association has relied on in-house expertises of a small number of volunteers to run these hosting services safely and securely since its inception, access to this expertise will cease in the near future as these volunteers step back from their Association roles.
 

Currently Hosted Sites

Our Server

We are currently offering the following dedicated AWS cloud-based server for website hosting:

  • OS:
    CentOS Logo

    Linux - CentOS 7.x
  • CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2686 v4 @ 2.30GHz (4 core(s))
  • RAM : 16 GB
  • Storage space : 600 GB - can be resized on an ad-hoc bassis as need arises.
  • Control Panel : 
    Plesk Logo 2016

    Plesk  Oynx 17.x
  • Unlimited Bandwidth 
  • Dedicated IP Address

The server has the following software installed:

  • Apache Server, with:
    • PHP 5.6, 7, 7.1 (we regually update the latest stable version and are happy to discuss installation of other PHP version),
    • Secure FTP
    • SLL Support (free certificates can be setup via Let’s Encrypt service)
    • Note: SSH into the server is not permitted as standard.
  • DNS Server provided by AWS, but controlled by PLESK.
  • MySQL Database Server
  • Email Services (Dovecot/Postfix), with:
    • Webmail
    • POP3
    • IMAP
    • Forwarding
    • Mail Groups (on request)
  • Web Statistics
  • Git and Docker
  • and much more...