Tell me more ×
Academia Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for academics and those enrolled in higher education. It's 100% free, no registration required.
up vote 16 down vote favorite
5

I would like to have a professional academic webpage, and for different reasons, I don't want to use the website of my current workplace (mostly because due to some external factors, it's not currently possible where I work, but also because I consider changing affiliation in the future, and I'd like to avoid moving my webpage).

A possible solution I'm considering would be to rent a server somewhere, and to manage it myself, but I was wondering if it existed some dedicated solutions for academics, ideally coming for free (after all, I can archive my papers on arXiv for free, I have a free academic licence for Bitbucket, I use Dropbox with the free version, I can also use Mendeley and academia.edu for free, I currently have a free wordpress.com blog), with the constraint that I'd like to be able to write my own scripts (for instance to publish my personal list of publications Tool to manage and/or make available my personal list of publications? , or to manage a list of conferences I'm interested in).

share|improve this question
Note that I wouldn't mind paying, I mean, it's possible to find basic web hosting for 1 euro per month, but I'm just wondering if something dedicated exists. – Charles Morisset♦ Apr 19 '12 at 14:18
15  
I'd strongly recommend getting your own domain name and pointing it at whatever site you are using. That doesn't address the question of where to get hosting in the first place, so I'm not submitting it as an answer, but even if you find a good solution, it's important not to get too tied to it. – Anonymous Mathematician Apr 19 '12 at 15:29
Thanks, that's a good advice indeed, and I actually have my own domain, pointing a wordpress blog right now. – Charles Morisset♦ Apr 19 '12 at 15:32

8 Answers

up vote 3 down vote accepted

I personally use altervista.org and I am satisfied with it. They give me 500MB space and 10Gb bandwidth for free, an address of the form yourname.altervista.org, run php 4 and 5 and a database service (with low performance in the free version), and allow a custom .htaccess. They offer paid upgrades and the option of putting banners for a revenue, but you can say no without any disadvantage.

They allow file upload only via (unencrypted) ftp, but you can automate that part easily.

It's not academics-specific, but as far as I can see neither is any other answer given up to now.

share|improve this answer
That's actually really cool. I have found since then another solution, but that's exactly what I was looking for. I guess the 500MB/10GB is perfectly enough for an academic usage, and at least, there is no ad on the basic version (I found some services offering free hosting, but with a banner included, which is not very serious ...). – Charles Morisset♦ Sep 25 '12 at 12:10
@CharlesMorisset: Can you please share the other solution that you have found? – Federico Poloni Sep 25 '12 at 13:28
Good point, sorry: a friend of mine has his own server, and he is hosting my site. – Charles Morisset♦ Sep 25 '12 at 13:31
up vote 7 down vote

I recently created a website with Google Sites (https://sites.google.com/site/hadanylab/) and I think it was a good experience and a nice result. Easy to use, editing is the same as in Google Docs which is nice. Customization can be a pain, but that is expected. You can get around some of the difficulties using widgets, though.

share|improve this answer
I'll second this one, a colleague of mine used a Google Sites website for his online CV. Very barebones, but then again, you don't need much; a picture, some text, and a link to some recent papers is fine, and you can do that with Google. – eykanal♦ Sep 24 '12 at 18:41
up vote 3 down vote

It's not academic specific, but Amazon.com has instructions for setting up a free web server using their free Micro EC2 instance type. As specific academic websites are fairly low traffic, generally speaking, that might be an option that gives you the scripting flexibility you're hoping for.

share|improve this answer
1  
Thanks, could you provide some links for info about that? I find their pricing quite hard to read! (I'm more used to read monthly/annual rates). – Charles Morisset♦ Apr 20 '12 at 8:20
up vote 3 down vote

You could look into a cloud application platform like Heroku.

Essentially, you can deploy web applications for free (with or without a custom domain name). You only pay if you need more power or more database storage. They also have addons, some free and some paid. You don't manage the details of the server, you only worry about your application.

For example, you can instantly deploy a rails app with a git push command. If you need to run a periodic tasks, you can enable a cron addon: free for a daily task or a fee for a more frequent task.

share|improve this answer
up vote 3 down vote

Both bitbucket and github allow you to publish a static website, which is handled under the same version control policies as everything else that you publish there.

You get no php/database support, but for academic web sites a static website generator such as Jekyll, which they both use, is more than enough.

share|improve this answer
Well, without PhP support, I can't use the bibtexbrowser, which is really cool to display your publications from a bibtex file. – Charles Morisset♦ Sep 25 '12 at 10:33
1  
True. However, if it is ok for you to sacrifice the bibtex links, you can run bibtexbrowser locally (in the end, it is a program that outputs a static html file) and put the output on bitbucket/github. – Federico Poloni Sep 25 '12 at 11:30
1  
I myself am planning to use github for this purpose. Since I use git for my research projects this seems to be a straight forward option. It is also possible to use a custom domain for github pages. I would recommend Octopress to anyone considering using github or Heroku. – crash Oct 1 '12 at 15:32
Another reason to use Ocotpress: I just discovered that there is a plugin that renders bibtex-files so that you can display references or your publication list by simply embedding a .bib-file. Thus, no need for PHP support. – crash Oct 10 '12 at 22:30
The problem I found with Octopress is that I couldn't get it to display math equations properly. Ended up writing my own python static blog generator with support for math, code, citations, and references. It was a nice experience, I recommend it (see github.com/yoavram/yoavram.github.com/tree/source) – yoavram Nov 27 '12 at 14:05
up vote 2 down vote

One possibility is Wikidot; its main version is free plus has some additional features for researchers and teachers.

Another one is WordPress.com, which you already have mentioned. If you a server, WordPress.org may be even a better option (as it is much more adjustable).

However, for papers/conferences/etc it may be better to use widget from a dedicated server (or add by hand).

share|improve this answer
I've had a look at Wikidot, but it doesn't seem possible to write scripts with it. As for wordpress.com, that's the same problem, and I can't put a widget on it. – Charles Morisset♦ Apr 19 '12 at 23:00
@CharlesMorisset In Wikidot you cannot run scripts. I see, your emphasis is on running scripts. When there are high-level products, usually they don't allow to run scripts. When you want to have something more customizable you need to have a web server, which usually isn't free. – Piotr Migdal Apr 20 '12 at 13:24
up vote 1 down vote

What about google sites? I have a "website" on it. I don't quite remember the amount of data you can have on it.

share|improve this answer
I tried it very quickly, but it didn't seem possible to add custom scripts, for instance to include personal bibliography (it might be possible with a google scholar widget, but it's not very flexible). – Charles Morisset♦ Apr 19 '12 at 23:02
I have used google sites in the past. Its actually less flexible than most wikis. – bobthejoe Apr 20 '12 at 6:36
up vote 1 down vote

To my knowledge, Google sites with a custom domain is the best solution here. Google sites gives 100MB space with unlimited bandwidth. Also, You can keep your pre-prints on Google docs and make them public. Additionally, you can use some widget like writing a blog.

You can look into my website to get an idea, It took me 20 minutes to set it up.

share|improve this answer
As I commented on drN's answer, it didn't seem possible to add custom scripts, for instance to include personal bibliography (it might be possible with a google scholar widget, but it's not very flexible). – Charles Morisset♦ Sep 25 '12 at 10:35

Your Answer

 
discard

By posting your answer, you agree to the privacy policy and terms of service.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.