Technical features of website hosting

In this page you’ll find the main technical features of A/I website hosting.

Please check out also our FAQ pages for more docs. If you still haven’t found what you are looking for, try our General FAQ or write to us.

Site URL

Unless you have your own domain, the main URL where your site can always be reached is:

https://www.autistici.org/site/

(or www.inventati.org). A/I uses a proxy to redirect automatically your visitors to the server where your site actually is hosted.

Space usage

The web space offered by A/I has no strict limits. This doesn’t mean that you can drop any responsibility while using your space: to keep update you will always be reminded in your user panel about the total space you are using in our servers. The less space you use, the smaller will be the load on our structures!

PHP / MySQL

We do not offer PHP support for new websites anymore.

For old websites, you must ensure that the site works with the latest PHP major version (8, at this time), as we will be progressively phasing out support for older PHP versions.

CGI scripts

Due to the way services are organized, at the moment A/I does not offer the possibility of running CGI scripts.

Archival of abandoned websites

It’s fairly normal for projects to end, and for websites to stop receiving content updates as well as software maintenance at some point in time. We commit to doing our best to preserve such content in the long term, however abandoned websites pose a few issues:

• the site might be relying on technology that is no longer available (e.g. a specific old version of PHP)
• the software used by the site might become out of date, and if it’s no longer updated there might be security vulnerabilities that could threaten the whole shared hosting platform

If we detect that a site has been abandoned for a long period of time (> 5 years, but possibly sooner in case of known vulnerable software), we will automatically archive it.

Website archival is an automated process that takes a snapshot (the best way it can) of a website, and saves it in a static form. This is then made available semi-transparently in place of the old website. The list of archived sites is available at:

• archive.autistici.org.

Hosting conditions

These apply generally to all hosted websites, but most specifically to dynamic PHP-based websites.

• We of course expect you to comply with our policy.

• We expect you to maintain the e-mail address associated with the website: if the email address expires due to inactivity, we’ll no longer have any way to reach the site owners and will make decisions on our own.

• We expect you to maintain the website software (e.g. Wordpress, Drupal) up-to-date with respect to security issues. If these go unaddressed, we might have to resort to archiving the website.

• Commercial advertisement is strictly forbidden.

• Do not install apps or plugins that track users, even if only for the purpose of collecting traffic statistics: we have our own solution for that and you should use it.

Furthermore, we wish to remind you that:

• If you’re using your own domain, you will most likely end up being the point of contact for any third parties reaching out about abuse, spam, or other administrative issues.

• As with all other A/I services, you are ultimately responsible for all content hosted on your website.

• We can’t, unfortunately, offer any type of specific technical support for applications running on our hosting infrastructure - unless the issues are about the infrastructure itself.