C. Internet administration
Website elements
It is common in Japan for hosting to be done on a turnkey (丸投げ) basis, where one firm takes care of site design, system software, hosting, and domain name registration. While this is convenient in the beginning, turnkey contracting makes the customer completely dependent on the provider for the entire service, and moving to a new provider can be extremely expensive and difficult.
We therefore have divided the elements of our Internet presence into several separate contracts. This gives us much greater flexibility and freedom, and the slight cost of needing a little background knowledge of how Internet sites operate in order to manage our contracts. The key elements of our services are explained here.
- Domain registration
- This is the registered name used for our website. Our domain name is currently
gsl-nagoya-u.net. This registration must be renewed from time to time; as of this writing, it is valid through June of 2008, and the current Registrar is Melbourne IT in Australia. Bennett currently controls the settings of the domain name on the Melbourne IT servers, and is responsible for arranging for domain registration renewals. - Hosting service
- The hosting service is the company that provides the Internet server behind our domain name. The hosting service is separate from the domain name; the hosting service machine has a numeric address, and the domain registration and nameserver connect the domain name to this computer-friendly address. Our server is currently hosted from Tokyo by まるごとサーバー, a member of the GMO group of companies. The hosting contract needs to be renewed once each year.
- Nameserver
- The nameserver is the machine that tells everyone on the Internet what machine the domain name points to. The nameserver is controlled by us through the domain name registrar. The nameservers we currently use are maintained by Starling Software, and are offered as part of our general support contract with them. It would be possible to switch to a set of nameservers inside the University, but for this we would need to arrange for the necessary support from University technical staff, which is not currently available.
- Registrar
- A Registrar is a company that submits registration statements for domain names to the relevant Internet authorities on behalf of customers like ourselves. In Internet hosting contracts, the hosting service almost always relies on a specialist firm to handle the registration of the domain name. It is a better policy for the customer to deal directly with a qualified Registrar for the domain name registration, to avoid being held captive. This is our current practice.
- Support contract
- While the content of the website is (and should be) our internal responsibility, the software used to manage any Internet site must also be managed and maintained. This is specialized work, and costly to supply from inside our Faculty. Our website has been designed and built by Starling Software, who also provide our support contract. If technical issues arise, the first step should be to contact Starling staff for advice.