Virtual Servers – Subdomains of soton.ac.uk

Note: the University is currently in the process of migrating corporate, public facing websites into a content management system. This will implement a standardised web site address schema which will supercede the need for virtual servers. iSolutions will continue to support virtual servers where required, but we encourage site owners to consider using the CMS as a more suitable long term solution.

Departmental web pages at University of Southampton originally had URLs in the form: http://www.soton.ac.uk/~school/. This means using the strange "~" mark and can lead long and unintuitive URLs. Increasingly, people expect to be able to guess the URL for a site. For instance, they might be more likely to type in the url in the form http://www.school.soton.ac.uk/.

Virtual servers provide a means of creating friendly URLs for your site. You will be able to create web pages as before, but certain things will be made easier. For instance, you can easily provide a search of your school web pages (more information is available on creating a search page). In addition, weekly access statistics will be available for your site at http://www.webstats.soton.ac.uk/.

We will attempt to provide the requested server name, provided it meets certain criteria. You should request either http://www.school.soton.ac.uk/ or http://www.project.school.soton.ac.uk/. We will only create http://project.soton.ac.uk under special circumstances.

Notes:

To have a virtual server, the web site must reside within a generic account. Virtual servers cannot be created to rectify errors in printed publicity. Request, confirm availablility and double check URL spelling before advertising in print.

University pages held in the corporate CMS take the form http://www.southampton.ac.uk/school/project/. This format is reserved, and not available for virtual servers.

As a general rule, we can provide virtual servers for recognised University schools and departments. It is not feasible to provide virtual servers for every group, course or other sub-units within schools. However, we do recognise that there will be "special cases" which fall outside the general rule (eg. major cross faculty research initiatives) and will try and be as flexible as possible. If your request is for other than a school/department name, be sure to complete that last section of the form.

All requests will be referred to Communications for approval before implementation. You should allow one week for the form to be processed.

NOTE: We are not able to provide virtual servers for clubs and societies; they are for schools, departments, and research groups only. However, clubs and societies can request "groups" on our web portal, which will allow you to post photos, make announcements, and have a discussion forum. To request a group, log on to the portal with your iSolutions username and password, click on the groups icon in the top right of the page, and click on request group.

Request a virtual server.