Who pays for your server?

[Gordon Wright]

There's been some debate around the small grad school where I work about whether paying for server space for the public-facing website should go on the budget for the IT dept or the Communications dept. These server expenses are offsite, and largely managed by Communications, but there's a sense that IT is IT...

Anyone else have issues with this on their campus?

[Patrick Burt]

Gordon, we are a large institution and for the university's home page, central IT maintains the server in their data center at no cost to us. 

However, for other enterprise systems such as Events website, News website, and other sites we pay central IT for hosting space, power and emergency power in the data. It is not cheap and most folks around campus do not host their server there. Typically, web hosting, or servers are paid for by the departments, divisions or colleges they represent, whether they are internal or external and only enterprise systems dealing with university business or online learning are supported by central IT.

We, Marketing and Communications, choose to have our own servers in order to have control over configuration, OS and servers to run on them versus being a told what we can do. But we do have an internal IT team and a team the work on web development.

[Gordon Wright]

Patrick, thanks for the response! That's really helpful.

Basically seems like whoever administers the servers is the one who pays for them, eh?

[Chris Wiegman]

Our campus currently has the chancellor's office funding the servers for their switch to a content management system. They originally sent out requests to each department for money, but when that failed there was no one else who could afford it.