Behind TheBioHub Labs

Why this exists

The Bioinformatics Hub at the University of Calgary maintains its own research-facing web infrastructure — TheBioHub.ca, the Microbial Clinical Atlas, this site, and every lab homepage we hand-build — because institutional IT no longer reliably supports it.

Documented incidents that prompted the move to AWS:

• In June 2025, the domain bioinformatics.ucalgary.ca was registered for the Bioinformatics Hub at the Snyder Institute. In April 2026, the IT team informed us that the domain had been recorded under a former team (Applied Spatial Omics Centre), and the Snyder Institute was unable to retain it. Our access to the underlying server was revoked without notice, and the server has not been maintained since.
• The same site was previously offline for roughly 60 hours after an SSL certificate failed to renew — a routine maintenance task that is normally automated.
• shinyapps.ucalgary.ca, which hosted interactive R/Shiny applications for clinical and research collaborators, has also been offline for an extended period without resolution.
• Provisioning a single virtual machine through the institutional process has been documented to take more than a year — a task that takes any researcher under 30 minutes on AWS directly.

As a result, we now run all of the Bioinformatics Hub's public-facing infrastructure on Amazon Web Services in Canada (ca-west-1), independently provisioned and maintained as of May 1st, 2026. This is a permanent setup, not a temporary workaround — the institutional alternative has proven unstable and unaccountable.

Running our own infrastructure means we carry the cost — EC2 instances, domain registrations, TLS certificates, storage, and the engineering time to keep everything running. Lab Branding is one of the ways we fund that work: every lab we host helps offset the cost of running infrastructure for the rest of the Bioinformatics Hub's research outputs. Should you wish to support this work in any form — through a discretionary contribution, a memorial fund, or by simply commissioning a lab homepage — we would be honoured to hear from you, and grateful for your consideration.

What we offer

Lab Branding is our first experiment — a hand-built homepage service for academic labs at the University of Calgary. A complete visual identity, an academic-grade homepage, hosting with disaster-recovery backups, and hassle-free maintenance. See the full pitch →

Acknowledgement

The Bioinformatics Hub is supported by the Snyder Institute for Chronic Diseases at the University of Calgary. The Snyder Institute has long recognized the growing importance of computational biology, data science, and bioinformatics in advancing biomedical research.

Under the leadership of Dr Braedon McDonald, the Bioinformatics Hub was established to help meet this need by supporting researchers, clinicians, trainees, and collaborators with bioinformatics expertise, data analysis, scientific software development, and translational research infrastructure. Through this work, the Hub aims to strengthen interdisciplinary collaboration and help turn complex biological and clinical data into meaningful scientific insight. Ultimately, the Hub contributes to translational research that bridges discovery and clinical application — advancing our understanding of chronic disease and supporting better outcomes for patients.