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Comment by justin--sane | Hacker News Reader

I would actually be interested to move our research groups website there. However, I'd first have to check with the Uni IT / security if it is allowed to host a website externally. This could be a general problem - did you look into University policies to see if this could be an often occuring issue?

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Your question is quite common among our first adopters. We have talked with representatives of a few universities. As of now they don't have any objections. However, we are working on clarifying this with other universities in US and Europe.

In any case, the functionality that Labit currently offers doesn't pose a risk to individuals and research groups. Moreover, many labs host their pages on Wix, WordPress, SquareSpace etc. and their university administration doesn't mind. I think that these are the reasons why there were no objections from administration so far.

And a question for you in return.

How important for you is the ability to have a custom domain for your research group? On a scale from 1 to 10.

10, since it is policy here to use a subdomain of the university.

Of course, all data hosted on the lab website is usually not sensitive. But I know of a couple of unis where the policy is quite rigid and they simply do not allow any external hosting. Do you have any plans to allow self-hosting? It seems to work quite well for wordpress and ghost...

For those cases, where the policy is very strict, we are going to contact universities directly first. If that doesn't work then we will have to find a way to allow self-hosting while preserving the connection to the whole platform/network as that is the main purpose of the service.

Can you tell me the name of your university? You can send me an email (rc[at]labit.io) if you would rather not share this information on HN.

And regarding custom domains. We are definitely working on that. It is our top priority right now.

You'd imagine that most everyone with marketable IP would insist on self-hosting on an air-gapped network. Uploading confidential and potentially valuable data to a cloud run by an unaccountable individual with no serviceable address would be a no-no for many.

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