Hosting

MyPortal can run in our UK cloud, or inside your own infrastructure. It is the same build either way — there is no cut-down on-premise edition, and both options are supported the same way.

Not yet. MyPortal is under active development and is not ready to hold live school data. This page describes the intended shape of a deployment so you can plan and evaluate, not a supported production setup.

What you are running

A MyPortal deployment is three things:

1. A SQL Server database. Holds everything. This is the thing to back up.
2. The ASP.NET Core Web API. Stateless — scale or restart it freely.
3. The Angular application. Static files, served by any web server or CDN.

Identity is delegated to an OAuth 2.0 / OpenID Connect provider, so your existing directory remains the source of truth for who people are.

Hosted by us

We run it in the United Kingdom, handle upgrades, backups and monitoring, and you get an environment your team signs into. Most schools should take this option unless there is a specific reason not to.

Hosted by you

If you self-host, the data never leaves your infrastructure and we have no standing access to the instance. That suits schools and trusts with an existing hosting arrangement, or a data protection position that requires it.

You will need somewhere to run a .NET application, a SQL Server instance, and a team — yours or a partner’s — who can look after both.

Backups

Everything that matters is in the database. A standard SQL Server backup schedule — full plus differentials, with tested restores — covers MyPortal entirely, with one exception: if you configure file storage on disk rather than in the database, back that location up alongside it.

Test the restore. A backup you have never restored is a hypothesis.

Upgrades

Schema changes ship as ordered, repeatable migrations, so an upgrade is a predictable operation rather than an evening of nerves. Apply them to a copy of production first, take a backup, then run the upgrade for real. We provide the release and the migration notes; you choose when to apply them.

Data protection

Whoever hosts it, the school is the data controller for its pupil and staff data.

If we host, we act as your processor under a data processing agreement, working on your documented instructions. If you host it yourself, the personal data stays on infrastructure you control and the usual obligations around access control, retention and breach reporting sit with you.

Either way you can export the full dataset, in a documented schema, at any time and at no charge.