Free or cheap way for kids to get supervised web sites hosted?

December 4, 2005 9:19 AM

Can you recommend a way to enable about 100 high-school students to get their small low-tech web sites hosted for free or very cheap?

Their current websites are built using MS Publisher, but other tools will be used later. Ideally, each student would be able to password-protect viewing of their site to avoid strangers seeing any personal details. And ideally, their teacher would have an 'editor-level' password that would allow supervision of the student sites.

posted by iffley to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

Sounds like the sort of thing you'd take to your local Freenet or ISP to see what they could do for you.
posted by danwalker at 9:43 AM on December 4, 2005

If strangers aren't meant to see it, it sounds like something you'd do on a computer within the high school's intranet, not on the Internet. Bypasses the whole password-protection problem outright.
posted by mendel at 10:04 AM on December 4, 2005

Run your own server. It would be much easier and could be attached to the internet if you wanted.
All you would need is a reasonably fast computer and Apache, which is free. Find a volunteer who can set it up for you (3-4 hrs) and hey presto!
posted by xoe26 at 10:45 AM on December 4, 2005

Definitely run it on the intranet. A cheap machine shouldn't be hard at all to set up.
posted by devilsbrigade at 11:07 AM on December 4, 2005

If this is a technology class (as opposed to, say, a social studies class with a website project), maybe it'd be best to make them find hosting themselves. There's plenty of free ones out there.

Otherwise, I second the local machine running Apache notion.
posted by borkingchikapa at 11:40 AM on December 4, 2005

Here's how I set up something similar at a school.

I used an aging 400MHz PC with 2 4G hard drives scavenged from other decrepit machines. I installed FreeBSD, Apache and Samba and hooked Samba into the local Windows domain controller. When all was said and done, students would log in to the windows domain and could then access their own files from a familiar Windows environment.

Configuration was a pain in the ass. Samba configuration is a dark art and the web wizards only make it slightly better, but once it was configured everything was lovey-dovey.

I'd use a more modern UNIX that's more configuration friendly if I were to do it again.

You're a teacher? If you've never done this before, it will be a way steep learning curve. Even if you are experienced like me and are working teachers hours, it will take you weeks to set his up unless something else gives. If you can find a really eager student, you can get some benefit there.
posted by plinth at 3:28 PM on December 4, 2005

My webhost (just a user, not employed or anything like that) allows unlimited subdomains, and the silver plan is very reasonable. If it's a hundred kids, have 'em bring in fifty cents each.
posted by JackarypQQ at 12:08 AM on December 5, 2005

If you have a competent technical person you could go get one of 1&1's root servers which comes with Plesk management tools to allow you to create users and subdomains for each person. At $70 a month it's not cheap but that's less than $1 a month per student.
posted by phearlez at 9:33 AM on December 5, 2005

Best answer: Thanks for all the advice. We needed hosting on the open internet because I wanted parents to be able to see their kids work. And physically hosting it all ourselves was just too much effort and risk.

So here's what we did. I signed up for a free account at freewebs.com, then paid $5 for FTP access for the month that we'd be uploading the kids work. Each class created a folder on the site, each kid created a subfolder, and they uploaded away. So for five bucks we got rock-solid hosting, no admin overhead and a lot of proud kids and parents.

Downsides of this approach? The web addresses were a bit cumbersome, and everyone used the same password so there was a risk that someone might change other people's work.
posted by iffley at 7:01 PM on December 29, 2005