Penn State Personal Web Server

The purpose of www.personal.psu.edu is to provide web hosting services in a unified place for Penn State departments, organizations, faculty, staff and the general student population.

On July 28, 2023, the Personal web server will be retired as a service. This change aligns with the retirement of the PASS service upon which it depends to store web content.

ACTION: Please migrate your data to another platform before July 28. You can review the recommended options to replace PASS-based web hosting features on Choosing Your PASS Alternative.

As of April 20, 2021, the personal.psu.edu servers are running Red Hat Enterprise Server 7 with Apache HTTPd 2.4.6. There are some differences between Apache 2.2.15 (which we used to run) and 2.4.6 which may affect your web sites. A complete overview of new features in 2.4 is available here. Apache 2.4.6 comes with a new expression parser for server-side includes by default, but we have enabled the legacy parser due to errors we saw on existing web sites.

As of June 20, 2018, HTTPS (SSL/TLS) has been enabled on personal.psu.edu and www.personal.psu.edu. HTTP is NOT being redirected at this time; both protocols coexist. Please check your CGI and pages for hard-coded HTTP URLs and switch them to HTTPS.

As of January 5, 2017, www.personal.psu.edu was transitioned to linux .

Using Penn State Personal Web Space

These services let you use your PASS space to serve content via HTTP.

• Apply for Web space on personal.psu.edu.
• Use server side includes (SSI) to include files or dynamic content in your web pages.
• Serve your content securely using SSL on protected.personal.psu.edu
• Test your CGI on test.scripts.psu.edu.
• Serve PHP scripts via the Penn State PHP Web Service (php.scripts.psu.edu).

Penn State Resources and Documentation

• Use PASS Explorer to modify permissions on your files.
• Pass Utilities
• Personal Web Space FAQ
• Use supported CGIs in your web pages.
• Learn how to make web pages accessible for users with different disabilities.
• Penn State Policy on Web Page Design

Other Hosting Options

• Host a wordpress site on campuspress.com using sites.psu.edu.

Departments and Penn State Units

Departments and other Penn State units can use Virtual Web Hosts service to use a URL like http://NAME.psu.edu/ where NAME is a name related to the department or unit.