Website Sustainability

Google Apps update alerts: Deprecating web hosting support in Google Drive : "Beginning August 31, 2015, web hosting in Google Drive for users and developers will be deprecated. Google Apps customers can continue to use this feature for a period of one year until August 31, 2016, when serving content via googledrive.com/host/doc id will be discontinued. In the time since web hosting in Drive was launched, a wide variety of public web content hosting services have emerged, and we think better options are available to people today. As a result, we have decided to discontinue this feature and focus on the core Drive and Google Apps experience. " To read more go  Google Apps update alerts: Deprecating web hosting support in Google Drive : 'via Blog this' All opinions in this blog are the Author's and should not in any way be seen as reflecting the views of any organisation the Author has any association with.

My Top 5 List of Free Web Hosts - Yahoo Voices - voices.yahoo.com : Taken from:  http://voices.yahoo.com/my-top-5-list-free-web-hosts-12095296.html?cat=15   Looks at    evaluating several web hosts and comparing them to premium service providers and seeing how they stack up. 'via Blog this'

Found this interesting but haven't had time to play with it but Designly looks like it might  be a solution, though I don't know what the pros and cons are. Creative Bloq  said  "The ultra-easy way to create a website. If you think that making a website ought to be as easy as clicking, dragging and typing, get a load of Designly..... Plus, if you're happy with your site being on the Designly domain and are happy with slightly limited bandwidth and storage, it's free to use. " To read more of the article go to:  http://www.creativebloq.com/web-design/designly-offers-website-creation-rest-us-10135058 Designly Demo:  http://www.designly.com/demo/ Designly:  http://www.designly.com/templates/ 'via Blog this'

How to Share Your E-learning Course for Free With Google Drive - E-Learning Heroes : ' via Blog this' Related Dropbox (see: http://websitesustainability.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/alternative-hosting-approach-1-dropbox.html )  Google Sites (see: http://websitesustainability.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/google-sites-for-sustainability-week-3.html  ) Hosting options: http://websitesustainability.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/hosting-how-to-get-it-out-there-for.html Free tools: http://websitesustainability.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/the-best-free-tools-for-website.html Amazon S3 (see: http://websitesustainability.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/thoughts-about-using-amazon-s3.html ) Google Drive see  http://websitesustainability.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/hosting-on-google-drive-case-study.html

Previously in this blog I looked at Dropbox as a tool for web-hosting . I recently came across this link  How To Host a Simple Website Using Dropbox : a few tools to take this further. Personally, I haven't played with them so I am not sure how good they are; but the posting is interesting -  http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-host-a-dropbox-website/ If you do try them out please let me know if they are any good. Related Dropbox (see: http://websitesustainability.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/alternative-hosting-approach-1-dropbox.html )  Google Sites (see: http://websitesustainability.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/google-sites-for-sustainability-week-3.html  ) Hosting options: http://websitesustainability.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/hosting-how-to-get-it-out-there-for.html Free tools: http://websitesustainability.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/the-best-free-tools-for-website.html Amazon S3 (see: http://websitesustainability.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/thoughts-about-using-ama...

Came across this article  Best Free WordPress hosting options  (no prizes for guessing what that is). Also the following might be of interest on setting up a wordpress site in the first place. 'via Blog this'

As an example of the ideas of web sustainability can be used for local and small charities: Hartwell Home and Garden Produce Show - a village produce show run entirely by volunteers:  http://hartwellproduceshow.weebly.com/ Principles - Free web hosting; - Easy to implement and relatively quick to produce; - Web skills are likely to be basic - no HTML knowledge - Easy to maintain - it must be relatively easy to give control of the site when or if the original person leaves. For more information on the tools being used:  http://websitesustainability.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/hosting-how-to-get-it-out-there-for.html

A list of free web hosting advice postings including guidance on how to use some of them.:  Dropbox  (see: http://websitesustainability.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/alternative-hosting-approach-1-dropbox.html )  Google Sites (see: http://websitesustainability.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/google-sites-for-sustainability-week-3.html  ) Hosting options: http://websitesustainability.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/hosting-how-to-get-it-out-there-for.html Free tools: http://websitesustainability.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/the-best-free-tools-for-website.html Amazon S3 (see: http://websitesustainability.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/thoughts-about-using-amazon-s3.html ) Google Drive see  http://websitesustainability.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/hosting-on-google-drive-case-study.html

Previously I looked at using other tools    to host sites sustainably (or even free)  such as:  Dropbox  (see: http://websitesustainability.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/alternative-hosting-approach-1-dropbox.html )  Google Sites (see: http://websitesustainability.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/google-sites-for-sustainability-week-3.html  ) Hosting options: http://websitesustainability.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/hosting-how-to-get-it-out-there-for.html Free tools: http://websitesustainability.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/the-best-free-tools-for-website.html Amazon S3 (see: http://websitesustainability.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/thoughts-about-using-amazon-s3.html ) In this post I look at a real web site being moved to being hosted on google Drive as a case study of moving sites that need preserving on to Google Drive as a hosting option. 1. First step is to capture the static HTML files. We need to copy all the files we want, this has been discussed previous see ...

As an alternative free hosting option I have started looking at Amazon's web service. Go to  http://aws.amazon.com/free/ To give some idea of why I have copied details in quote below from http://aws.amazon.com/free/ "AWS Free Usage Tier (Per Month): 750 hours of  Amazon EC2  Linux Micro Instance usage (613 MB of memory and 32-bit and 64-bit platform support) – enough hours to run continuously each month * 750 hours of an  Elastic Load Balancer  plus 15 GB data processing* 10 GB of  Amazon Elastic Block Storage , plus 1 million I/Os, 1 GB of snapshot storage, 10,000 snapshot Get Requests and 1,000 snapshot Put Requests * 5 GB of  Amazon S3  standard storage, 20,000 Get Requests, and 2,000 Put Requests * 30 GB per of internet data transfer (15 GB of data transfer “in” and 15 GB of data transfer “out” across all services except Amazon CloudFront) * 25  Amazon SimpleDB  Machine Hours and 1 GB of Storage ** 100,000 Requests of ...

The project all along has set out to move the website in a sustainable way across to a google site that at the very least provides a doorway to the EMUA's East Midlands Knowledge Network site. The approach has been to build Google Sites (Google) version of the site leading to either pages on the google site or  pages on a dropbox site until the google site version is ready. The aim at the start of the project was to have the site independent of the partner institutions so no-one partner has more control than another over the site. But, is there another way that both increases the sites sustainability? One possible way is for the site to be independently hosted (via Google Sites) but the partner institutions/universities  to have ownership (and possibly to host their own) content. No one institution would have overall control but manage their own resources/presence on the site. This idea has been floated and has the potential to improve the sustainability by the instituti...

The currently free Dropbox   provides an alternative place to store a website. But only if we talking about static content (ie. content which is not changed dynamically by PHP, etc but is basically HTML). Dropbox provides a public folder which can be view by one with the appropriate link. First we need to copy the site, so we have local copy on our own machine. This can be done using the method as an example shown in  the earlier blog entry Caught it . Next, we need a Dropbox account. Go to www.dropbox.com and you should see the following: Click on the download button and follow the instructions. You will need an email address. We actually on need the Typical setting. This will add a piece of software to machine. With a little box icon at the bottom of your screen, if we click on this we see the files and folders in the dropbox, open the public folder, now.transfer files over to public folder Go to the dropbox website and log-in Then do Step 2...