scripts.mit.edu

Is scripts.mit.edu appropriate for my site?

In general, scripts.mit.edu is well-suited for dynamic sites (including blogs and wikis, as well as custom apps) for individuals and small groups, but its volunteer-run nature may make it poorly suited for larger groups (such as labs). IS&T has a page detailing other options for making a website at MIT, which can help you decide where to host your website.

scripts.mit.edu is run by volunteers from SIPB, MIT’s student computing group. It is neither run nor supported by IS&T. We provide best-effort support via email at scripts@mit.edu, but we can’t guarantee that we will be able to help with your problem or that we will have any particular response time, even for urgent requests. Please keep this in mind before using scripts.mit.edu for a mission-critical application.

scripts.mit.edu uses multiple servers for load-balancing and reliability, and has historically maintained very high uptime. However, we can make no guarantees about future uptime, and there are many Athena services outside our control whose outages can impact scripts.mit.edu sites.

One particular concern around around the best-effort support policy involves security issues. Scripts policy when we discover that a scripts account has been compromised and is running exploit code is to disable the account. We will only reenable it once the account owners confirm they have fixed the site, and a Scripts maintainer has verified that the exploit code and original vulnerability have been fixed. This can sometimes take a large amount of maintainer time, and therefore there may be significant delay before our volunteers have a chance to reenable the site. As a result, if your site being down for at least several days after a security issue is prohibitive, you should use a different hosting solution.

Also, scripts.mit.edu is based on MIT’s infrastructure, and thus the MITnet Rules of Use apply to all sites hosted on the scripts.mit.edu platform. In particular, use for private financial gain is prohibited (so don’t run your startup on scripts.mit.edu).