OIT is officially launching Web Publishing, OIT’s new web hosting and management service.

Web Publishing is powered by WordPress and built in a new, modern high-availability hosting infrastructure. Websites hosted in Web Publishing will have higher uptime, faster page loads, and a more reliable experience for both site owners and visitors.

This new service is a successor service to OIT’s existing WordPress Blogs and Hosted WordPress services. If your website is powered by WordPress and hosted elsewhere (e.g., cPanel, AFS, off campus), there’s a really good chance Web Publishing will be a good fit for you.

Web Publishing is an OIT project, but we’ve been fortunate to have support from our colleagues in University Communications as well — and Web Publishing is the exclusive home for UComm’s free WordPress theme for campus.

There are three service levels in Web Publishing:

• Free – You can build websites, well, for free! Students, faculty, and staff can build as many websites as they want self-service at [something].wordpress.ncsu.edu URLs. This service level is well-suited for personal websites, small-team websites, and just learning and practicing WordPress.
• Standard ($324/year) – This is the “Website in a Box” level. You get everything you need to build a professional and functional NC State website that meets the needs of most departments and other campus units. This includes UComm’s free NC State Theme plus plugins for forms, people directories, access controls, Newswire, and more!
• Custom ($360/year) – This is the “WordPress-as-a-Service” level. If you have specific themes and plugins that you’d like to use — or you’re building your own — you can define your own “service offering,” or collection of themes and plugins for your website. OIT’s responsibility is to provide a stable platform to power your website, handle all of the “WordPress-y” maintenance tasks, and provide support for your content authors and editors.All themes and plugins have to go through a code review process, so that we can identify possible trouble spots. But once they’ve been reviewed, we’ll provide full support to your content creators when they’re using those tools.

If you have more than seven websites, then bulk-rate pricing is also available for $2,250/year plus $36/site/year. Just like at the custom service level, you can define your own “service offering” collection of themes and plugins, and that service offering (and nothing else) will be available to websites included in your bulk rate agreement.

So what happens next?

Thank you!

Brian