BWH Introduction

The Backup Web Hosting (BWH) service is intended as a simple emergency web site which you may direct web queries to when your main website is offline. This could provide a holding page or pages with basic information. It is not intended as a full backup website, just an emergency web presence so that people trying to access your resources can be given information such as details of the current maintenance or outage, alternate ways to contact your site, or links to alternative resources which may still be available.

The web server will not support locally executed CGI scripts, but JAVA scripts which would run on the client will work, so it is possible to produce quite complex holding pages if desired. The service does not provide a HTML editor, it is up to administrators to produce a master copy of the intended web site using local resources, e.g, on a laptop, which could still be used, perhaps using a mobile network, if your Janet connection were down. A copy of that website is then copied to your account on the BWH service using SCP (the secure copy protocol).

Assuming you are hosting both your website and DNS locally, this service is only useful if you still have the ability to update your DNS when your site is offline. This would generally require you to host your DNS offsite. If you have not already considered how you could achieve this, it would be worth asking about how the Janet Primary Nameserver Service could be used as part of your business continuity plans.

This service is currently provided at no additional cost to Janet Primary connected Organisations.