The Web Development Systems are your central access point for web publishing on Shared UW Hosting. They are fully-functional GNU/Linux servers that allow you to transfer files using SFTP to a web publishing folder, and to connect using an SSH client in order to use a remote terminal on these servers. This provides a highly-flexible web publishing system that supports the use of extremely customized applications. Using these tools, you can configure a MySQL database server, install a CMS such as WordPress or Drupal, compile programs, and run scripts.
The Shared Web Hosting service has different servers, depending on your affiliation type with the UW. Generally, students will use vergil.u.washington.edu, and faculty/staff will use ovid.u.washington.edu (note: localhome allows for a better experience for ovid users). There are differences between these systems, and it is recommended to learn more about each one.
All UW students are eligible to use a shared web hosting development environment known as vergil. Learn More about Vergil
All UW faculty, staff, departments, and courses are eligible to use a shared web hosting development environment known as ovid. Learn More about Ovid
When you first log into your Web Development Server, you will be in your Linux home directory, which contains files that are just accessible by yourself and anyone else with the password to this account. Your home directory is commonly used to store backups, databases, and other information that shouldn't be public. If you have Shared Web Hosting activated, you should also see a folder in your home directory named public_html. This is a special link to space on the web publishing servers, and any content you transfer to public_html will show up at your website URL.
Users may be affiliated with the UW as both a current student and employee. When this occurs, they will be eligible for both student and staff web publishing services.
If a user is both a student and employee at the UW, they may be eligible to use both the Student Web Publishing and the employee Web Publishing services. If only one of these is activated, their public_html folder will point to the proper server for that active service. If both of these services are activated there will be two folders: public_html and student_html. In this case, public_html will always point to the employee website, and student_html will always point to the student website. For more information: public_html and student_html folders
In addition, users with multiple affiliations will also be able to use both the student and faculty/staff web development environments. These systems share file systems, and users can switch between these interchangeably.