Silk Web Hosting: Introduction

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The University of Vermont’s Silk hosting service allows affiliates to develop and share web content using a variety of programming languages and application stacks. This manual explains the common configurations and provides examples.

Quick Start

You can obtain a silk account by emailing a request to Systems Architecture & Administration.

Your silk site is http://<mynetid>.w3.uvm.edu. Access your site with ssh <mynetid>@w3.uvm.edu.

Host names

All silk accounts have a site named <mynetid>.w3.uvm.edu. If you would like additional sites for development, separation of different applications, or have specific hostname needs, see Hosting questions for more information.

If needed, aliases can be added for existing sites so that multiple hostnames reach the same web site. This is generally best kept to things like adding an optional “www.” to your site name.

All sites are provided with an SSL/TLS certificate.

File locations

Most resources are contained within your account’s home directory, often written as ~/.

Document root: ~/www-root
Files placed here appear under the top level of your web site.
Temporary PHP storage: ~/phptemp
PHP uses this folder for temporary storage of session data and uploaded files.
Web server logs
Access and error logs are maintained in a searchable database for at least 100 days. See here for details.

Special folders listed above can be cleaned out, but require special access permissions and SELinux security contexts for proper use. Deleting and/or replacing them may require that you restore their security contexts (see Find/Repair Broken SELinux File Contexts).

Resource limits

Silk users are assigned resource guarantees and limits to ensure availability of disk space, processing time, and memory. You can see the specific settings assigned to your account by typing silk account info.

CPU shares
Everyone is assigned a share of CPU processing time. When the system is especially busy, this ensures that small sites still work as expected despite time used by busy sites.
Memory
Most sites are limited to 4GB of simultaneous memory usage. Generally speaking, a site exceeding this limit needs tuning to be usable more than it needs additional memory.
Disk usage
Disk quotas make sure that people do not accidentally fill up the system disks. You can find out what is using up disk space by logging into your account via SSH and executing a command such as du -ah | sort -h, which will display a list of files, sorted by size. Web server logs can often use up a lot of disk space; you are free to compress or remove those that you no longer need.

If you believe that you need additional resources, please contact Systems Architecture & Administration.