Support Requests and FAQ’s

We want to find the right fit for your website needs. Whether it be with us, or a different service on campus. Please send an email to wps-clientengagement@office365.wisc.edu explaining your website service needs. Include as little or as much information as you like, and a qualified professional will be in touch shortly.

The marketing pages outlining DoIT’s Web Hosting service offering can also be found at: https://it.wisc.edu/services/web-hosting

The web hosting automation software used to manage your site is called Plesk. If you’d like to review some general information about using the Plesk dashboard to manage your site please see the following Plesk documentation.

You can access your account contacts and other account information from this site.

Our full Knowledge Base can also be found at https://kb.wisc.edu/webhosting

If you have a specific question about your account, please feel free to fill out the support form below including all details about your particular issue.

The DoIT Web Hosting Administration Login is the the universal location for users to login to their site administration panel. The site management information for the administration panel and Secure FTP is supplied to account contacts via email when the account is established.

• If you have forgotten your administration control panel password, please see this KB article.

• If you are having issues making a Secure FTP connection please review the following KB article for troubleshooting tips.
• The administrator ports for the Admin Panel and Secure FTP are firewalled to UW-Madison IP space — Please make sure you are on WiscVPN if you are trying to access your site off campus.

If you are still having issues logging into via the administration control panel and/or making a Secure FTP connection please fill out the support form below including all details about your particular issue.

Please fill out your request with the following New Site Form if requesting a new site.

Please fill out this New Domain Form if you are requesting an additional domain for your site.

You can review your account information from this site.

For more information please review the following KB articles about account contacts and billing for the service.

If you’d like to inactivate your account please review the follow Web Hosting – Inactivating Your Account KB Article.

We also provide free redirect services upon request.

DoIT Web Hosting provides Secure hosting over SSL (with options for restricted data), Web Application Firewalls (WAF) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack protections.

ModSecurity Protections:

Mod Security is an open source Web Application Firewall (WAF) that blocks suspicious traffic from accessing your site. There are cases where Mod Security will block normal traffic creating an error for that particular user. If that happens to you while browsing your site (403 Mod Sec Error), please review the following KB Article.

We will need to be notified that you are getting tripped up by Mod Security so we can construct specific exemptions for those false positives. When reviewing a Mod Security error message in the logs, the “ID” of the rule and the time you encountered the error are most important to us. If you could include that information, or a screenshot of your logs and submit a support request from the form below we will be able to resolve your case sooner.

SSL/HTTPS:

All Web Hosting domains utilize trusted SSL certificates and by default are hosted entirely under https/SSL.

Distributed Denial of Service attacks (DDoS) Protections:

Several layers and tools are employed to maintain protections.

If you are interested in setting up a WordPress site with DoIT Web Hosting, there are some important things to consider and please review our guide for using open source packages, such as WordPress.

You will be the primary administrator for the content and responsible for maintaining updates for your WordPress site. Meaning you will need to update all themes, plugins, and WordPress itself in order to patch security vulnerabilities. If you have never done this before, we highly recommend the free central campus service called WiscWeb where all core and plugin updates are handled for you and you just need to focus on creating and managing your content.

If you would like to check out WiscWeb, please visit the WiscWeb new website form (https://wiscweb.wisc.edu/request-a-new-site/ ), which will walk you through the process. Once you are in their system, you will receive information on how to access your project and can start playing around with the WordPress environment and adding content via the UW Theme.

A note to mention about using the WiscwebCMS service is that you do not have  direct access to a filesystem/database, cannot install WordPress plugins (they maintain a curated set), and cannot run other applications within your domains.

While you are free to install any plugin and theme on your DoIT Web Hosting WordPress site, know that the server your site is hosted on has a gathering of other sites, which share resources. So if a specific plugin is going to require a great deal of resources, know that you could potentially impact other users, and sites on the server. If you are concerned about this and need someone to speak to about WordPress hosting please email wps-clientengagement@office365.wisc.edu

We recommend administrating your site via Plesk’s WordPress Toolkit. This interface allows you to manage all plugin/theme updates. Create site backups and login to the WordPress admin.

If you ever need to download your entire site to your computer you have a few options. Our preferred way of accomplishing this is outlined in the following KB Article. If you need to export your database please use either the Plesk interface by clicking Databases -> Export Dump or use phpMyAdmin clicking the “Export” tab and “Go” to create a backup. There are many plugins that also accomplish this task, yet DoIT Web Hosting provides limited support for these external plugins.

If you are experiencing issues with the platform itself (timeouts, file upload size etc.) we will adjust the settings of your site to allow the plugin to work correctly, but direct support would be handled by the vendor of the plugin.

Many WordPress sites and plugins experience issues in the WordPress admin with our security package for the server called Mod Security. If you encounter errors while saving/create pages etc. in WordPress’ admin please review the previous question about “Mod Security issues” and submit a support request.

We also recommend installing a security plugin for WordPress to help throw out bad traffic to your site. WordPress sites are notorious for being scanned by bots looking for vulnerabilities. We suggest using WordFence for all WordPress. If you are using WordFence and the UW Theme together please see the follow KB Article about configuring WordFence for the UW Theme

If you’d like your site to require NetID authentication please fill out the form below requesting NetID for your site. If there are specific locations/directories that you’d like to require NetID protection on please include that information in your support request.

https://kb.wisc.edu/webhosting/30854

NOTE: If you are using a Shibboleth Plugin for WordPress, please review the following KB Article.