Stanford Web Services will retire sites for a variety of reasons. This ensures that Stanford maintains only sites still in active use and which are monitored for policy compliance by current members of the Stanford community.
This policy outlines the scenarios that will result in site retirement.
Sites on Stanford Sites
Owners of sites hosted on the Stanford Sites platform will receive a notice to renew their ownership once every 12 months. Sites on Stanford Sites will be retired if:
- The site owner or manager chooses not to renew the site.
- The site owner or manager requests to delete the site.
- The leadership of the parent organization requests to delete the site.
- The content on the site is in violation of university policies.
- The site is being used for purposes not related to Stanford University.
- The site is being used as a redirect to another site.
- The site is abandoned. This may be determined in the following ways:
- Ownership information has not been updated or verified for more than a year.
- The site owner, primary site manager, and/or accessibility contact are no longer at Stanford, and no additional editors exist on the site as possible contacts.
- A newly-created site has no significant original content (other than the default content provided upon installation) and has existed for more than 6 months with no login by an owner, primary site manager, or editor.
Personal Sites on Stanford Sites
Personal sites hosted on the Stanford Sites platform will be retired when the individual is no longer affiliated with Stanford University. This will be determined by the deactivation of the site owner's SUNet ID.
Stanford Sites Intranet
Site owners of intranets on the Stanford Sites platform will receive a notice to renew their ownership once every 12 months along with an invoice for the annual fee.
An intranet hosted on the Stanford Sites platform will be retired if it meets any of the retirement criteria above, in addition to the following:
- The annual fee is not approved.
- Content on the intranet is found to contain high-risk data. (Note that Stanford Sites is not approved for any high-risk data.)
Disposition of Retired Sites
The following is the procedure for retiring sites:
- The site will be backed up one final time.
- The site will be deleted from the production environment.
- Site owners have 180 days from the date of retirement to request restoration* of the site.
* Note that a site can be restored only if a hosting environment is available to which it can be restored. If the site is in an earlier version of Drupal, and the hosting platform has been upgraded since that time, Stanford Web Services may require a fee-based project to upgrade the site before it can be restored to a production environment.
After 180 days, a backup of the site content is deleted automatically and can no longer be restored.