Website Content

Web hosting provided by the IT Center is exclusively intended for websites and applications that cannot be hosted in the central CMS of RWTH Aachen University and that are not covered by RWTH or IT Center services like RWTHmoodle or others. Particularly the usage of the web server as file server is forbidden. We do not assume any responsibility with regard to contents. The website operators are, in accordance with the statutory regulation, responsible for the contents and maintenance of the page and are liable towards third parties themselves. An imprint is required in any case. Further guidelines can be found in the Network Code of Conduct of RWTH Aachen University (Netzordnung der RWTH). We reserve the right to block the page in case of non-compliance with these regulations.

All databases are to be used via the web application only. Databases cannot be accessed from outside. 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.

Contact Persons

Contact person accounts and invitations are personal and cannot be passed on. Contact persons therefore take full responsibility for their personal accounts and the safe storage of access data. All contact persons are furthermore responsible for their websites' contents and the accounts (especially the upload account provided by the IT Center) of the website. It is assumed that the listed contact persons have the necessary basic IT knowledge required for the chosen kind of website. This is particularly the case for the "standard web hosting" service, where it is assumed that all contact persons are familiar with the PHP software in use. Websites of any kind can only be operated if at least one contact person assumes responsibility towards the IT Cener.

Accessibility

Admin interfaces of the categories 'Blog' and 'Typo3-CMS' and the WebDAV access for websites can only be accessed inside the RWTH network (incl. VPN-Access). For security reasons, please restrict the accessability of your pages reasonably. Especially administration sections cannot be accessible worldwide.

Security

The IT Center is responsible for the hostingplatform, meaning the (virtual) server hardware, operating system including installed apache and php software packages. The contact persons are responsible for the security of the website content, especially for the used software. The used software is excpected to be updated to the latest version. Attacks from outside have to be prevented with available technical resources. This includes regular software updates as well as protecting account data, administrator or user accounts. The IT Center won't assume liability for damage done by old or unsecure software.

To be able to maintain the security and availability of the RWTH network and the webservers, we'll block websites which content is threatening our networks and / or servers or which content is reducing the reputation of our systems. Furthermore we'll block websites which software isn't updated to the latest version without critical security risks more than two weeks after a warning by us.

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 the restart.

URLs and Domains

All DNS entries of a websites have to be administrated via the IT Center. We do not take liability for problems caused by DNS entries that were hosted externally. Basically all URLs that are part of 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 an other institute is not possible. URLs outside of the rwth-aachen.de domain are possible but have to be applied for seperately at the IT Center. Costs resulting from this must be paid by the institute.

Contact

Important information about web hosting and announcements about changes of the service are published via the 'web hosting info' mailinglist. Contact persons need to make sure that they receive the hereby published information. Information on the mailinglist and how to subscribe to it can be found on the following page:
https://lists.rwth-aachen.de/postorius/lists/webhosting-info.lists.rwth-aachen.de/

Note: Please be aware that the terms of use can change at any time. Changes are annouced a month in advance via the mailinglist 'web hosting info'.