We are an academic group (sort of) that is looking to stand up a server or so for some public-facing apps and databases, but it's like no one has ever heard of such a thing. They keep giving me servers that are behind a firewall and only accessible on-campus.
We could maybe do AWS or Azure, but that is really expensive and not really covered by our (government) funding. Plus, any time you want to do something like that (particularly with a company the university doesn't have an existing contract with), you have to get several layers of bureaucracy (including lawyers sometimes) involved. We are a state school, so you can guess how fast that moves.
In general, it's easier to ask for a $500k instrument, or take $10k trips to conferences, than get $10/month subscription for some web hosting company. Academia can be really behind on this front.
(For me, academia is generally ok and fun in my current position, but this part is getting ridiculous)
> In general, it's easier to ask for a $500k instrument, or take $10k trips to conferences, than get $10/month subscription for some web hosting company. Academia can be really behind on this front.
Had to fight to get paid most months; but the $2mil grant for a computing cluster went through and the Supervisor never had a problem getting their monthly trip to a conference through.
Have you looked into cloudflare tunnels/ngrok? You can expose any service to internet without dealing with ip addresses, firewalls or opening ports, etc.
And tailscale can also give you a private access to any resources even if it's behind firewalls and all that (say you want to access the gpu cluster from your laptop at home).
And they can all run in user space without elevated privileges.
We are an academic group (sort of) that is looking to stand up a server or so for some public-facing apps and databases, but it's like no one has ever heard of such a thing. They keep giving me servers that are behind a firewall and only accessible on-campus.
We could maybe do AWS or Azure, but that is really expensive and not really covered by our (government) funding. Plus, any time you want to do something like that (particularly with a company the university doesn't have an existing contract with), you have to get several layers of bureaucracy (including lawyers sometimes) involved. We are a state school, so you can guess how fast that moves.
In general, it's easier to ask for a $500k instrument, or take $10k trips to conferences, than get $10/month subscription for some web hosting company. Academia can be really behind on this front.
(For me, academia is generally ok and fun in my current position, but this part is getting ridiculous)