Web Hosting Terms of Service

The University of Victoria provides a Web Hosting Service (hence known as the Service) for faculty, staff, and students to use in order to publicly share information in support of their teaching, learning, and research activities. The university’s Service is designed to ensure that faculty, staff, and students are able to share information without being bound by the terms of commercial providers. The University of Victoria also offers an Online Academic Community service for a similar purpose that utilizes Wordpress as a content management system. The Service consists of a web-accessible folder that can be used with a variety of content management systems. In order to enable this flexibility, users of the Service must take greater responsibility for the maintenance and administration of their sites.

The following agreement describes the terms by which you may access and make use of the Web Hosting Service at the University of Victoria, which is accessed at web.uvic.ca or studentweb.uvic.ca. In order to become or continue to be a user of this Service, you must read and accept all of the terms and conditions of this agreement. These terms help to ensure the security and reliability of the service for everyone. If you do not agree to be bound by and follow the terms of this agreement, you should not use nor access this Service, and determine if an alternative service better meets your needs.

The University of Victoria reserves the right to modify this agreement at any time, by posting amended terms for acceptance on this site; if you wish to be notified when these terms are amended, please subscribe to our Informed system category for Web Hosting Service. Your continued use of the Service indicates your acceptance of the amended Terms of Service.

The University of Victoria’s Web Hosting Service is provided to departments, active faculty, active staff and active students affiliated with the University. Use of this Service is subject to the following terms and conditions, rules, and guidelines.

University Policy

The use of the Service is governed by all applicable University policies, including but not limited to:

University Policy IM7200, Acceptable Use of Electronic Information Resources. This policy pertains to information technology services and to the resources these technologies make available in support of the university community.

University Policy IM7800, Information Security (and Associated Procedures). This policy defines the authorities, responsibilities, and accountabilities for Information Resources and Information Systems security.

Note: This service is not intended for the hosting of data classified as Highly Confidential, Confidential, or Internal. Refer to Policy IM7800 section 8.0 for information classification levels.

University Policy IM7700, Records Management (and Associated Procedures). The purpose of this policy is to ensure that university Records are created, used, disposed of and preserved in a systematic manner, compliant with relevant legislation.

University Policy GV0235, Protection of Privacy (and Associated Procedures). This policy articulates how the university complies with the privacy components of the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FIPPA).

The University of Victoria reserves the right to suspend public access to, and/or decommission[1] a site at its discretion if the content or use of the site violates the appropriate guidelines outlined in the above policies.

Copyright Obligations

The use of the Service is also governed by the Canadian Copyright Act and guidelines outlined by the University of Victoria Copyright Office. Nearly all text, images, audio, video and other information created by third parties, including material found on the Internet, are subject to copyright protection. When posting copyrighted content, you must comply with the various conditions imposed by the author/creator of the work. The University of Victoria Copyright Office provides resources, guidelines, policies, and workshops through their website. Any questions or concerns are to be directed to the Copyright Officer at copyright@uvic.ca.

Eligibility

The Service is available only to departments, active faculty, active staff and active students at the University of Victoria with an active NetLinkID. To be considered an active faculty, staff or student, you must be currently employed by or be registered in an academic program/classes at the University of Victoria. When you are no longer considered an active faculty member, or active staff member, access to your site and the contents will cease to be publicly accessible within 30 days. When you are no longer considered an active student, access to your site and the contents will cease to be publicly accessible at the end of the semester. If you would like to migrate the content of your site to another service, we recommend you download your content prior to your departure from the University with a secure FTP client.

Access and Renewal

In order to use the Service, you must subscribe using the procedure outlined. Once subscribed, you must renew your subscription periodically (annually for faculty, staff and departments, and every academic term for students) for your site to remain active. You will receive email reminders near the end of the subscription period informing that your site is about to expire. Should you fail to renew within the time period provided, your site will be expired[2].

Canada Anti-Spam Legislation

Canada Anti-Spam Legislation requires consent in order to send commercial electronic messages. The use of this Service requires the University of Victoria/University Systems to send email notifications for the purpose of informing users about upcoming site renewal and expiry deadlines.

Security Standards and Requirements

The use of the Service requires that your site conform to principals outlined in IM7800. In particular:

26.00 Users must:

Make a reasonable effort to become familiar and comply with this policy and its associated procedures, standards and guidelines;

The use of the Service is dependent on your site remaining secure and up-to-date. If your site uses any scripts (e.g. PHP, Perl) or applications (e.g. Drupal, WordPress, Joomla) it is your responsibility as the site owner to maintain current versions of script/application software, and to ensure patches for security vulnerabilities are applied immediately. Should the University inform the campus community of critical updates for various script/application software, as a site owner, you are required to make the specified updates. If your site is found to be hosting outdated, unpatched, or vulnerable software, the University of Victoria reserves the right to temporarily suspend public access to your site until updates are applied. If you wish to be notified of known critical security vulnerabilities that could impact scripts or applications, please subscribe to our Informed system category for Web Hosting Service.

Backup and Recovery

Backups of the Service are conducted nightly with all file changes being kept for 30 days. Deleted files can be retrieved up to 130 days following deletion.

Any requests relating to restoring data are to be directed to the Computer Help Desk at helpdesk@uvic.ca.

Disclaimer

The University of Victoria will endeavour to ensure that the Web Hosting Service is available; however, access to this service may be suspended temporarily and without notice in circumstances of systems failure, maintenance and repair, or for reasons beyond the control of the University of Victoria. More information about computing issues and outages can be found on the University Systems service status website.

References and links to any website external to the University of Victoria must not be taken as an endorsement by the University. Content posted within the Service must not be taken as an endorsement by the University of Victoria.

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¹ Decommissioning of a site results in the immediate suspension of public access, however the site owner maintains the ability to access their web content via Secure FTP. A site owner is unable to reinstate public access to their site without University Systems’ approval and involvement.

² Expiry of a site results in the immediate suspension of public access in addition to the inability to access one’s site content via Secure FTP. Site data will remain in the www and www-dev folders for a 60 day period, following which, the data will be removed. Should a client re-subscribe to the service within the 60 day period, their web space will be restored to the previous state.

Web Hosting Terms of Service v2.7 | Last updated: Aug 16, 2019