Web Hosting for Sites, Tools and Web Services

Life science digital databases, tools and services are often exposed to users through web-based interfaces. Hosting these web services on dedicated servers can often be expensive, hard to maintain, or restricted by institutional policies. UK-based researchers can easily make their tools and research software available on CyVerse UK’s cloud infrastructure.

CyVerse UK is a cloud-computing platform based here at Earlham Institute that is able to support web hosting services alongside more demanding data and computational environments. You can see below some of the services we already host, and if you are a UK-based researcher and you would like to host your own web services we’d be delighted to help you.

Unlike other web hosting providers, we are part of the UK life science research community and understand the needs of researchers. Large-scale commercial cloud providers do not typically offer support and project design assistance, but simply access to virtual machines. Institutional providers can often be slowed down by red tape and restrictive firewalls or server configurations.

Cyverse UK’s fast and flexible services are underpinned by our extensive bioinformatics expertise, and we are therefore able to support a wide range of web-based resources and requirements that are directly suited to the life sciences.

Alongside basic web hosting, we provide:

• Full data and compute virtualisation and secure virtual machine instances, running typical Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Debian, and CentOS
• An easy-to-use catalogue of bioinformatics software packages such as sequence aligners, assemblers, expression analysis, etc
• Software and server maintenance and upkeep, to increase data integrity and security, and prevention from data loss
• Centrally-managed hardware in our secure data centre operated by a dedicated team for configuration, replacements and repairs
• Security audits of running services and vulnerability reports
• Other data storage and compute facilities.

A typical web hosting virtual server might include:

• 1-8 vCPUs
• 4-32GB RAM
• 5GB local VM storage
• Backed-up and mirrored Network Attached Storage
• Object Storage offering AWS S3 protocol compliant access
• Preinstalled software such as Apache HTTPD, nginx, and other web platform environments such as Django or Shiny
• A dedicated .cyverseuk.org URL, with support for DNS redirection and HTTPS certificates