Region, Zone, Register, and Parade Web Hosting

PCA offers free web hosting for chartered regions, Zones, official SIGs/Registers, and annual PCA Parades. If you'd like us to host your content, contact the Website Technical Advisor and Website Region/SIG Hosting contacts, found on the Contacts page.

You provide the site content authoring, and we'll provide hosting services and system maintenance on a Windows Server 2003 system. You may publish via FTP or (by request) FrontPage Server Extensions.

Note: FTP inbound connections are limited. This is one of the safeguards used to protect our site. Your FTP client must be configured to limit connections and detect server responses regarding excessive connections. Also, use FTP Passive mode for connections.

We do not offer individual PCA member or personal web hosting at this time.

Features

• Free to any PCA chartered region, SIG/Register, Parade, or Escape
• Plenty of disk space - no specific limits (but be reasonable please!)
• Runs on a dedicated 4-core virtual server with 4GB memory
• 40Mbps Internet bandwidth
• FTP-based publishing
• Optional DotNetNuke content management system for rapid web development by non-programmers and without software tools
• Can host secure web sites with the pca.org security certificate (https)
• Available 24 x 7 x 365
• Daily backups of content and data with time-based retention
• Protected by a tight firewall, the latest software patches, and proactive monitoring
• Access to your IIS log files by request, so you can generate your own access & usage reports

Hosting Platform

Your web site will be hosted on the PCA.ORG platform:

• Microsoft Windows Server 2008
• Internet Information Services 7 with .NET 3.5 Framework, ASP and ASP.NET scripting
• SQL Server 2005
• DotNetNuke version 4.9.4 content management system (optional)
• PHP version 5.2 (works with SQL Server; MySQL not supported)
• Dell PowerEdge 2950 server: 2 x quad-core 2.0GHz Intel CPUs (8 processing cores total), 4GB RAM, RAID-5 SAS disks

Domain Names

We can host your region's site even if you wish to have a private domain name. Just register your domain name, and let us know its name. We'll configure the server to automatically route people to your web site. Set your domain's IP address to 208.90.20.130.

Technical Support

For support and all questions related to PCA web hosting, contact both the Website Technical Advisor and the Website Region/SIG Host volunteers found on the PCA Contacts page. Email is the best way to contact PCA for support. Note that PCA provides support for hosting and related issues, but not web site programming or design.

Programming

Programming for the PCA.ORG server is straight-forward. You may provide static or dynamic HTML, ASP, or ASP.NET scripts. We offer a PHP interpreter too. Parent Paths are disabled for security reasons; this affects all object paths in your HTML so please be aware of this. You may program your web pages to work for any browser combinations you choose - it's up to you. We recommend using code which will work properly across the largest possible browser community, rather than just the latest version of one company's browser. Test your site with various browsers to make sure it looks as intended!

While you may post multimedia content, videos are very demanding of Internet bandwidth and consume a resource shared by other regions and datacenter users. Please limit your posting of videos, and use the shortest playtime possible.

We do not offer live debugging ability on the production server. You will need to build and fully debug your applications on your own development system and then upload the complete result. Note that you can always deploy a hidden test site to check functionality without upsetting your main region web site.

Default Home Page File Names

There are numerous filenames you may use as your default page in a any web directory. This is the web page which is automatically served to users who do not specifically request a file, i.e., www.pca.org/. The priority ordering of these default filenames are as follows (top is most important):

• default.aspx
• default.asp
• default.htm
• index.php

Prohibited Files

To prevent virus infection of PCA's server, and protect users, the following files cannot be upload to a hosted web site:

• *.exe
• *.com
• *.vbs
• *.bat
• *.cmd

Other PCA Web Site Hints & Tips

The Region Procedures Manual (RPM) has helpful information about creating and maintaining a PCA web site. You may find this material on the Forms & Documents page under Region Management.

Web Site Contest

At Parade 2002 in Boise, Idaho, PCA inaugurated a new National award - the Web Site Contest. The contest was conceived to promote improved, active web sites via competition and recognition. All regions, zones, and SIGs with web sites are automatically entered and judged each year, a few months before Parade. Winners are announced at the Parade. Review the contest rules in the Forms & Documents area, under Web Site Contest.

Content Policy

PCA is a family-oriented club and as such, your web site must avoid certain types of content. PCA reserves the right to immediately remove, without notice, any content deemed inappropriate. This includes, but is not limited to, web pages with the following content:

• Profanity
• Nudity
• Threatening language
• Attacks or slurs

Web authors should also insure that all of their content may be legally posted and does not infringe upon a copyright. Web authors are responsible for understanding and following copyright regulations. PCA will not be responsible for any region violating such regulations. Be sure that your region corporation owns the rights to your web site content.

The use of certain trademarks and graphics of Porsche AG and Porsche Cars North America are granted to PCA and its chartered regions under a license agreement. This agreement defines the manner in which those properties may be used. All PCA web sites must comply with the terms of the license agreement. Please refer to the usage guidelines published in the Forms & Documents page for further details.

FTP Publishing

• Connect to ftp://<your-region-code>.pca.org. Do not enter a directory name or region subdirectory, and do not try connecting to pca.org.
• Supply your user name and password credentials. Note that the password is sent via clear-text and can be intercepted on the internet.
• Select Passive mode (PASV).
• You will automatically be put into your region's directory and you'll have full access to your tree. You will not have access to any other location.
• When you are done, disconnect from the PCA FTP server by terminating your FTP program as appropriate.