General

The Webhosting service is run by the FH Aachen and is made accessible for RWTH Aachen University institutions by the IT Center. Accordingly, the operational responsibility lies with the FH Aachen.

Web hosting offers are exclusively intended for websites and applications that cannot be hosted in the central CMS of RWTH Aachen University and that are not covered by RWTHmoodle or other RWTH Aachen University services.

Terms of Service

In addition to the Network Code of Conduct of RWTH Aachen University, the following terms apply for the use of the Webhosting service:

• Two contact persons with adequate IT competence must be named per website. It is assumed that all contact persons are familiar with the PHP-software in use.
• The contact person accounts and invitations are personal and may not be passed on.
• The contact persons are, in accordance with the statutory regulation, responsible for the contents and maintenance of the page and are liable towards third parties themselves.
• The contact persons are responsible for the safety of hosted content, particularly the software that is utilized. Care must be taken to ensure that the software is up-to-date. External attacks should be prevented by effective measures using the available technical resources. The provided accounts (e.g. upload accounts) will be shared with the contact persons and are to be administered responsibly by them.
• Every website must have an imprint, a privacy policy, and an accessibility statement.
• The use of the web server as a file server is forbidden.
• Access to the website should be reasonably limited. Administration areas in particular, should not be universally accessible.
• The WebDAV-access for websites is only accessible from within the RWTH network (including VPN access).

We reserve the right to block the page in case of non-compliance with these regulations. This is particularly the case for websites that endanger networks or servers, and/or reduce the reputation of our systems. Furthermore, we reserve the right to block websites that continue to use software versions with critical security risks for longer than two weeks after being contacted by us.

Additionally, the following terms apply to the use of databases in the context of the Webhosting service:

• All databases are to be used exclusively through the web applications. External access to the database is not possible.
• The maximum volume of a database as well as the file system is 2 GB. If more storage is needed, this has to be arranged with the IT Center in advance.

Regular Maintenance

To be able to maintain the security of our systems, updates have to be done on a regular basis. We try to minimize the resulting outage and will restart the servers on Wednesdays between 7 and 9 a.m. if necessary. The websites will not be available for a few minutes during this time.

URLs and Domains

All DNS entries related to the web presence have to be administrated via the IT Center. We do not accept liability for problems caused by DNS entries that were hosted externally. Generally, all URLs that are within the institute's domain are possible. Other domains can also be set up (with exceptions), if they are related to a project, event, or similar. Applying for a URL in the domain of another institute is generally not possible. URLs outside of the rwth-aachen.de domain are possible, but have to be applied for separately via the IT Center. Costs resulting from this must be paid by the institute.

Contact

Important information about web hosting Service and announcements about changes are communicated via the webhosting-info mailing list. We recommend that the contact persons of the respective websites subscribe to this list. Information about the mailing list and how to subscribe can be found using the following link:

https://lists.rwth-aachen.de/postorius/lists/webhosting-info.lists.rwth-aachen.de/ 

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Note: Please be aware that the terms of use can change at any time.