Locally Hosted Websites

If a university hosts its website locally, visitors to the website from outside the campus and the rest of the world will compete with the university's staff for Internet bandwidth. This includes automated access from search engines that periodically spider your entire site. One solution to this problem is to use split DNS and mirroring. The university mirrors a copy of its websites to a server at, say, a European hosting company, and uses split DNS to direct all users from outside the university network to the mirror site, while users on the university network access the same site locally. Details about how to set this up are provided in chapter three.

Figure 8.1: In Example 1, all website traffic coming from the Internet must traverse the VSAT. In Example 2, the public web site is hosted on a fast European service, while a copy is kept on an internal server for very fast local access. This improves the VSAT connection and reduces load times for web site users.