Welcome to your quick mid-month summary of all things important and upcoming across our community. Stay up to date via our blog. Follow us on Mastodon, Bluesky, X and YouTube.

NewsReclaimEDU is growingSince its launch last year, our ReclaimEDU service has continued to grow. Simply put, ReclaimEDU offers our higher education partners the option of hosting their campus .edu in the cloud. Over the past year, the potential has become clear and with institutions like Macalester and Trinity College, who trusted us to get them set up early on, we now have a growing service that's going from strength to strength.
Read the full post.

Get ready for Open Education Week 2025March 3-7, 20205We are proud to take part in OE Week 2025, and support Open Ed Bloggers everywhere. An annual celebration, Open Education Week (OE Week) is an opportunity for actively sharing and learning about the latest achievements in Open Education worldwide.

Free to attend & everyone welcome. Don’t forget to Register!

During Open Education Week we are planning to:

share blogging tips and inspiration on Discord;
collate open resources and contribute our own;
encourage everyone to share blog posts, what works for their blogging practice or what is stopping them from blogging.

Blogging Community of Practice: Try out a blogging challengeThis "challenge" includes a couple of prompts about your blogging process, which you post a response to on your blog, and from which you can then ping or tag others to respond in turn. If you'd like to try it out for yourself, head over to Discord and get the prompts, and share the resulting link via the hashtag #blogging4life.

Develop your institutional capability in 2025We are committed to helping you make the most of open tools and infrastructure. We offer dedicated training for administrators, instructional designers and academic staff via virtual and in person training sessions supported by clear documentation and resources. Find out more and get in touch if you'd like to work with us to upskill your team or enhance your strategy.

Support and Services UpdatesContact us for help & support via our support portal.

Our team is working hard behind the scenes to keep our knowledge base updated. Check out recently updated articles:

Email Alternatives
Importing Installs into Installatron - Work Around

Community & Professional DevelopmentTechnology & Society: Generative AI on Reclaim TVFebruary 14 @ 10:00 am - 11:00 am

Join special guests Autumm Caines and Dr. Lance Eaton as we dive into their fascinating work for College Unbound, a course on Technology & Society: Generative AI, using OpenWebUI in the classroom.

Watch the stream over at Reclaim TV, or catch the recording later on archive.reclaim.tv or our YouTube channel!

ABC of Blogging – Community of Practice LaunchFebruary 19 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm

Join us to celebrate the launch of our new Blogging Community of Practice .

In this session we’ll introduce you to the new dedicated channel for this group in our discord space, show you how to get involved and also focus on the “ABCs” of blogging (ABC = Always Be Commenting).

Let us know if you have any ideas for community activities, questions you’d like us to cover or support you’d find helpful.

Free to attend & everyone welcome. Don’t forget to Register!

Say helloWe’d love to hear from you! Connect with our community of educators and edtech professionals. Like and subscribe, or use our platforms as a launching point to connect with others. Subscribe to our blog and follow us on Mastodon, Bluesky, X and YouTube.

Reclaim Hosting. Take Control of your Digital Identity.

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Get your diary out and save the date, because come October you will be attending a very special event: from October 27-31 Reclaim Open returns!

The theme of this year's conference is still under wraps, but if you've been paying attention to what's happening across our community this year, then you'll be right in assuming that this year's event will be a call to action to make your voice heard on the open web.

We are already working hard behind the scenes to get ready to conference like never before: over five days we will take to the airwaves, and your social channels. We are bringing together our community, asynchronously and also live on Reclaim TV. Most importantly we will be blogging - and you will, too (with a little help from your friends). There might even be some conference activities happening near you.

Watch this space for more information.

Key dates* March: Registration opens * May: Call for Proposals opens * September: Programme is out * October 27-31: Conference dates

As in previous years, the conference fees will be kept as affordable as possible, with discounted rates for adjuncts/early career researchers and free student places.

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Since its launch last year, our ReclaimEDU service has continued to grow. Simply put, ReclaimEDU offers our higher education partners the option of hosting their campus .edu in the cloud.

Every campus .edu network has unique requirements. We partner with our clients to discuss what works well, any pain points you might have, and how we can boost site performance with ReclaimEDU.

It was clear from the get-go that higher education institutions running their .edu sites on WordPress could greatly benefit from the kind of speed and uptime this services offers.

Over the past year, the potential has become clear and with institutions like Macalester and Trinity College, who trusted us to get them set up early on, we now have a growing service that's going from strength and strength.

What we've learnt so far Uptime, Uptime, Uptime! + Multiregion means failover: since your site is running on more than a single server, if one server goes down, the other can pick it right back up! + When all else fails, visitors can still get a static version of your site. No more HTTP Error 500 pages! * The speeeed! + Persistent caching keeps things quick. + Traffic is always pushed to the most responsive/performant server at any given time. * Security is our middle name* + DDoS Protection prevents attacks taking the server offline + WAF blocks malicious traffic from ever reaching server(s)

Get in touch with us to arrange your tour!

Take advantage of our high-availability, multi-region infrastructure from the hosting company you know will be there when you need it most.

Further reading...... on ReclaimEDU

ReclaimEDU homepage!
ReclaimEDU: the Infomercial by Jim Groom
Announcing ReclaimEDU: Your Campus in the Cloud by Pilot Irwin

... on the multiregion journey

Doing Multiregion WordPress Stuff With Cloudflare And Reclaim Cloud by Chris Blankenship
WPMR tag on Bavatuesdays

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In the few weeks since we started to announce that we are setting up a new community of practice all about blogging, AKA Bloggers Anonymous, things have been hotting up in the education blogosphere!

We have a great line up of events in the next few months and more folk joining us in the community space on Discord. We are also starting to tag all posts on our social media channels with the hashtag #blogging4life, so that you can follow and join in with the conversation more easily. It was here that I came across a couple of bloggers taking part in a blogging challenge.

This "challenge" includes a couple of prompts about your blogging process, which you post a response to on your blog, and from which you can then ping or tag others to respond in turn. I found it a fun activity to read posts one after the other in order to find out how other bloggers do their thing.

If you'd like to try it out for yourself, head over to Discord and get the prompts. You can simply post your responses on your blog, and share the resulting link via the hashtag #blogging4life and post it in our Discord channel to share it with others in the community.

Join the Blogging Community of PracticeWe have a dedicated channel set up in our Discord Community Space. This is a friendly social space where everyone is welcome and which is free to join.

Get started* Join us on Discord * #blogging4life is our hashtag on Mastodon, Bluesky, X and YouTube. * Subscribe to our blog to keep up to date with what’s happening * Come along to our events * Find out what is going on across our community

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Welcome to your quick mid-month summary of all things important and upcoming across our community. Stay up to date via our blog. Follow us on Mastodon, Bluesky, X and YouTube.

NewsNEW Blogging Community of PracticeWe are setting out to support a new community of practice for all education bloggers, AKA Bloggers Anonymous. We have a dedicated channel set up in our Discord Community Space. This is a friendly social space where everyone is welcome and which is free to join. There're also live events coming up, so keep an eye on our events calendar in the coming weeks.
Read the launch post.

Catch up with recent PHP Version ChangesAs time goes on and versions change, we need to update our cPanel servers' default PHP versions and remove deprecated versions. The changes affect Shared Hosting customers and sites hosted on Domain of One's Own and Managed cPanel servers. We've published details for those changes for 2025.

We've got you covered with our process outlined in our documentation. If you run into any errors after the change, we recommend following our guide to troubleshooting common WordPress errors and also check out our advice on resolving Scalar Issues with PHP 8.1.

Changes to Shared Hosting for 2025Over the past ten years, our Shared Hosting Service has grown from a boutique offering for pioneering students and staff, to a powerful yet affordable package that thousands of customers have come to rely on. With that bigger scale also come much bigger risks, and behind the scenes our team of dedicated infrastructure and support specialists works tirelessly to ensure that your domains remain safe and secure. Building the kind of resilient and robust shared hosting infrastructure however requires a lot of resources and for 2025 we’ve had to make the difficult decision to pass at least some of the increases in our costs onto our clients. Find out what's changing.

Develop your institutional capability in 2025We are committed to helping you make the most of open tools and infrastructure. We offer dedicated training for administrators, instructional designers and academic staff via virtual and in person training sessions supported by clear documentation and resources. Find out more and get in touch of you'd like to work with us to upskill your team or enhance your strategy.

Support and Services UpdatesContact us for help & support via our support portal.

New look invoicesWe're streamlining our invoicing processes for Domain of One's Own and Managed Hosting, making it easier and quicker for you to manage your renewals. Don't be surprised if your invoices look a bit different and if you have any questions please reach out and our team will happy to help.

Community & Professional DevelopmentKnowledge Commons with a Special Guest from Michigan State University January 24, 2025 @ 10:00 am - 11:00 am

The Knowledge Commons is the network for knowledge creators across the disciplines. You can use it to discover the latest open-access scholarship and teaching materials, make interdisciplinary connections, build a WordPress website, and increase the impact of your work by sharing it in the repository.

Larissa Babak will be joining us from Michigan State University to talk about the network, her role on the team, and give us a look behind the scenes of a change in repository platforms. Watch the stream over at Reclaim TV, or catch the recording later on archive.reclaim.tv or our YouTube channel!

Audrey Watters and Jim Groom: Blogging and Writing #4lifeJanuary 31, 2025 @ 10:00 am - 11:00 am

Join Audrey Watters and Jim Groom on Reclaim TV as they take a deep dive into blogging and writing #4life. We are excited to have special guest Audrey Watters join us for this show. Audrey is the acclaimed author of books including Teaching Machines, The Monsters of Educational Technology and Claim Your Own Domain.

Watch the stream over at Reclaim TV, or catch the recording later on archive.reclaim.tv or our YouTube channel!

Reclaim Hosting. Take Control of your Digital Identity.

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Many of the educators we work with have their own blogs alongside institutional or project blogs, and in these busy days, time for blogging is at a premium. So what would help you make time for blogging more regularly, and who can help you find your feet, whether you are a novice blogger thinking of writing your first post or a lapsed blogger trying to get back into it for 2025?!

Now, we believe academic blogging is not just for the holidays or indeed the odd conference, but for life (#4life), and that is why we are setting out to support a new community of practice for all education bloggers out there looking for a bit of support and motivation along the way.

Blogging Community of Practice AKA Bloggers Anonymous. Join inWe have a dedicated channel set up in our Discord Community Space. This is a friendly social space where everyone is welcome and which is free to join.

There're also live events coming up, so keep an eye on our events calendar in the coming weeks.

What to expectLet us know if you have any ideas for community activities, questions you'd like us to cover or support you'd find helpful. We are planning to:

share blogging tips and inspiration via the channel;
collate open resources and contribute our own;
organise monthly live sessions with guest presenters;
encourage everyone to share blog posts, what works for their blogging practice or what is stopping them from blogging.

If you'd like to be involved, get in touch and join us on Discord.

How we can helpIf you are new to blogging, we're here to help. We have a wealth of experience setting up blogs on platforms like Wordpress or Ghost, whether it's a personal blog or hundreds for a whole school of students.

Over the course of the year we'll be sharing our know-how via resources, live streams on Reclaim TV and our community events in Discord, but if you can't wait to get started, then head over to our Shared Hosting page and jumpt right in.

Stay up to date via our blog. Follow us on Mastodon, Bluesky, X and YouTube.

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After the recent update to our servers' PHP, moving from 8.0 to 8.1 as the default/"Inherit" version, we've had some end users write in to report issues with their Scalar installs. While the issue is easily fixed, it can be inconvenient and concerning for users who don't realize what's going on.

If your Scalar installation displays PHP errors when loading the site, you can go to the MultiPHP Manager tool in cPanel to check which version of PHP the site is using, to confirm whether the site is using 8.1+.

There are two possible fixes here:

Rolling the Scalar sites back to PHP 8.0 solves the issue.
Alternatively, you can go into your cPanel's File Manager tool, navigate to your Scalar site, and change the scalar root/codeigniter.php from “development” to “production.” (Special thanks to Jason Teitelman for his work tracking down and identifying this fix.)

If your site is displaying PHP errors but is on PHP 8.0 or lower, you can always use the File Manager tool to check your site's error_log file and see if any plugins or themes are namechecked in the error. We also recommend checking to make sure that your site is running the most recent version of Scalar.

If you have issues troubleshooting, please don't hesitate to reach out to Support.

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It's time to start the year in blogging here on our own domain and wish you all a happy new hosting year!

As we gear up for the start of another busy term, we also look ahead to what's on the horizon for 2025 and... there's a lot in store that's still under wraps. So watch this space in the coming weeks and months!

Stay up to date via our blog and follow us on Mastodon, Bluesky, X and YouTube.

Develop your institutional capability in 2025We are committed to helping you make the most of open tools and infrastructure. We offer dedicated training for administrators, instructional designers and academic staff via virtual and in person training sessions supported by clear documentation and resources. Find out more and get in touch of you'd like to work with us to upskill your team or enhance your strategy.

Save the date: Reclaim TV: Knowledge Commons with Special Guests from Michigan State UniversityThe Knowledge Commons is the network for knowledge creators across the disciplines. You can use it to discover the latest open-access scholarship and teaching materials, make interdisciplinary connections, build a WordPress website, and increase the impact of your work by sharing it in the repository.

In this episode we are joined by special guests Larissa Babak and Bonnie Russell from Michigan State University, learning about the network and taking a look behind the scenes of a change in repository platforms.

Save the date: January 24, 2025 @ 10:00 am - 11:00 am
Register free .

Also, here's a quick reminder of news for this month:

Changes to Shared Hosting from January 1st, 2025Over the past ten years, our Shared Hosting Service has grown from a boutique offering for pioneering students and staff, to a powerful yet affordable package that thousands of customers have come to rely on. With that bigger scale also come much bigger risks, and behind the scenes our team of dedicated infrastructure and support specialists works tirelessly to ensure that your domains remain safe and secure. Building the kind of resilient and robust shared hosting infrastructure however requires a lot of resources and for 2025 we’ve had to make the difficult decision to pass at least some of the increases in our costs onto our clients.
Find out what's changing.

Recent PHP Version ChangesAs time goes on and versions change, we need to update our cPanel servers' default PHP versions and remove deprecated versions. The changes will affect Shared Hosting customers and sites hosted on Domain of One's Own and Managed cPanel servers. Here's an overview of the changes for 2025.

Happy New Year from everyone at Reclaim Hosting! Here's to 2025!

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As part of our ongoing maintenance plan to keep Reclaim Hosting servers secure, we are updating the inherit/default PHP version for all servers on January 2, 2025

This was announced earlier this month. This maintenance will be happening on January 2, 2025 at 10:00 am ET.

As time goes on and versions change, we need to update our cPanel servers' default PHP versions and remove deprecated versions. The changes will affect Shared Hosting customers, as well as sites hosted on Domain of One's Own and Managed cPanel servers. Here are our upcoming plans for those changes over the course of the next year.

On January 2, 2025 we will be changing the default PHP version on all our cPanel servers, from PHP 8.0 to PHP 8.1. Only the default command-line PHP and sites set to "inherit" the PHP version will be impacted by this change; all other sites with a specified PHP version will remain using that PHP version.

If you are unsure which version of PHP your site is using, or whether your site is set to "inherit" the default version, you can always check and/or the version using the MultiPHP Manager tool in cPanel. Note that it is only possible to set PHP versions for domains or subdomains, not for subdirectories. If a site is installed on a subdirectory (eg, defaultsite.com/example), it will use the PHP version set for its parent domain (in this case, defaultsite.com).

In preparation for this change, we recommend reviewing your site(s) to confirm that they will perform as expected with PHP 8.0 at minimum. PHP version changes can occasionally result in compatibility issues, and we recommend working directly with developers or finding alternative plugins, themes, etc. should issues occur. As a rule of thumb, Reclaim Hosting recommends using site tools that are up-to-date and compatible with the latest versions of PHP.

If you want to get ahead of this change, you may change your site/account PHP versions by following the guide linked above.

If you have any questions about this, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at reclaimhosting.com/contact.

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For this final community chat of the year we are inviting ALL our special guests from 2024 to come together. You will hear updates of the exciting work happening across our community and have a chance to share your own highs and lows of 2024. This is our time to come together to say thank you and acknowledge and appreciate everyone who works in open edtech in Higher Education.

We hope to see you today!

When: December 18th
Time: 12pm ET
Where: meet.reclaimhosting.com/community-chat

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Hello and welcome to your quick mid-month summary of all things important and upcoming across our community:

NewsSecurity Update: OWASP Deployment & RollbackPSA: Reclaim Hosting deployed numerous ModSecurity updates using the built-in OWASP vendor provided by WHM. Due to these updates, many users faced issues like 403 errors, authentication failures, and disconnects. These rules have since been rolled back infrastructure-wide. We are currently revising our policy to implement these rules again in the future, and you can read more about that on our blog as well.

Meet the Open Web UI Installer for Reclaim CloudWe are excited to announce the newest Reclaim Cloud Installer, OpenWebUI! If you are interested in working with Open Learning Language Models check out our stream around larger open language models to learn more about OpenLLMs and hosting OpenWebUI on Reclaim Cloud.

Upcoming PHP Version ChangesAs time goes on and versions change, we need to update our cPanel servers' default PHP versions and remove deprecated versions. The changes will affect Shared Hosting customers and sites hosted on Domain of One's Own and Managed cPanel servers. We've published plans for those changes for 2025.

Convergence 10 Years OnBack in October Meredith Huffman was part of a 10 year anniversary celebration of UMW’s Hurley Convergence Center (originally the Information Technology Convergence Center). Inspired by the event, Jim wrote a post to reflect on his time at UMW with all those awesome folks and projects... 10 Years on!

Open Education community heads to BrisbaneWe are proud to support this year's OE Global Conference taking place in Brisbane, Australia, November 13-17th. Community is at the heart of what we do as an independent hosting company in Higher Education, and we are excited to be part of this wonderful event again this year. The key part of our collaboration with OE Global is the 'Conference of the Air' - a radio offering that runs alongside the formal conference schedule.

Don't miss the Reclaim RoundupSubscribe to our free monthly Roundup and don't miss out on the best GIF game on the open web (and yes, important service updates, security news and free events, too!). The Roundup is scheduled for 11/22 and 12/20, so don't miss out.

Community Chat: The WordPress DramaNovember 20th, 12-1pm ET

For this month’s community chat, we thought it made sense to talk about the Automattic and WP Engine drama, what that means for WordPress and the community of folks who use WordPress, and generally provide a place to ask questions, discuss, and share advice.

Read our recent blog post to catch up and start thinking about how to navigate the future of WordPress... and join us and have your say!

Be Kind. Rewind 2024Join us for Reclaim’s Rewind 2024 to celebrate community, collaboration, and our continued commitment to advocate for the open web in Higher Education and beyond. This month we are taking to the airwaves, our social channels, community forums, and video calls to look back at the best of 2024.

Join us for activities highlighting the best bits from the past year, including case studies and lessons learned. It’s time to take a step back and reflect together on everything we have achieved in partnership with admin, faculty and students, to gather our strength and find some renewed inspiration before the new year starts.

Let’s Rewind 2024 together as you tune in and join the conversation.

What's on Reclaim TVThis month, tune in toReclaim.TV, live on Fridays at 10am ET:

November 15 - Moving from Hugo to Ghost . Taylor's making a big CMS switch for his blog, he has lots of feeling about it, and wants to share what he's learned.
November 22 - Public Obsidian notes on cPanel . Oh yeah, we're back with another Obsidian stream. This time let's look at a static site generator that's pretty easy to use, and designed for Obsidian called Quartz!

And while you're waiting for these streams to premiere, catch up on shows with Reclaim TV On Demand:

You can see the updated schedule at any time by checking out events.reclaimhosting.com!

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PSA: Reclaim Hosting deployed numerous ModSecurity updates using the built-in OWASP vendor provided by WHM. Due to these updates, many users faced issues like 403 errors, authentication failures, and disconnects. These rules have since been rolled back infrastructure-wide.

Due to the many issues with scanning and bot traffic we have seen across our fleet, we have been implementing numerous tools to stop this traffic before it impacts our clients. One of these tools was the OWASP (Open Source Foundation for Application Security) Vendor for ModSecurity that is provided with WHM by default. We rolled out this update to our development servers to test its impact, then quietly rolled out the rules to all cPanel servers as a planned low-impact update to guarantee satisfactory performance for all users.

Unfortunately, this rollout did not go as planned. The rules did stop the bot traffic; however, they also highly impacted users and blocked legitimate traffic like authentication, WordPress plugins, file uploads, and more. This was due to an oversight during our testing process, and we are revising this process so we do not miss this again in the future.

Once the impact was realized, these rules were rolled back across our entire infrastructure immediately and the vendor itself removed to prevent auto-enable after rule updates.

We apologize for any inconvenience caused by these updates, and are revising our policies for security updates and development testing to prevent this scenario from happening again.

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This month, our community chat offers an open forum to discuss events unfolding in the world of WordPress.

Join the conversation - November 20 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pmFor this month’s community chat, we thought it made sense to talk about the Automattic and WP Engine drama, what that means for WordPress and the community of folks who use WordPress, and generally provide a place to ask questions, discuss, and share advice. Join us for the chat.

Recent developmentsIf you'd like to catch up on what's been happening, here are some useful links to resources to keep informed:

WordPress Drama Explained (and How it May Affect Your Website)There’s a lot of misinformation and fear being spread about WordPress. Here’s an objective overview of the latest WordPress drama, and how it may affect your website.WPBeginnerSyed BalkhiThe WordPress vs. WP Engine drama, explained | TechCrunchThis story has been updated throughout with more details as the story has developed. We will continue to do so as the case and dispute are ongoing. TheTechCrunchIvan MehtaWhat it means for institutions using WordPressIf you are someone in charge of a site that runs WordPress, or perhaps you are a Domain of One's Own or WordPress Multisite admin leading a community of folks using WordPress, this won't have much of an impact on you. WordPress still powers 43% of websites and this trademark dispute between large companies has much more to do with their businesses than your ability to use this tremendously popular, free and open-source tool.

The main thing to note is that WP Engine as a company no longer has access to WordPress.org, which means that their plugins will not be available there. WP Engine has a guide on how to install their plugins here, but the process is no different from other plugins that require manual installation, like those you might find on GitHub.

Navigating risk and uncertaintyProviding the best support we can is important to us at Reclaim Hosting, and we follow events like this so that you can rely on us as you navigate risk and uncertainty. For many in the Higher Ed community this dispute between Automattic and WP Engine is worrying to watch, but based on what's happening at the moment our team doesn't anticipate it having a large impact on most people using WordPress for their sites. That being said, we do regularly use this site and our monthly newsletter to let folks know about security updates, new tools, and anything we think may be relevant to our customers. We recommend checking in to stay up to date, and asking questions when you have them!

How do I keep up with what’s happening at Reclaim?We’ve been working hard on making it easy to keep up to date with announcements, events, and everything happening related to Reclaim Hosting! Your go-to tool in your utility belt should be community.reclaimhosting.com! This page has links to all the things we are up to, including Announcements, upcomingReclaim the BlogTaylor JadinBeyond WordPress: Resilient infrastructureWe have the expertise to help institutions assess their current infrastructure and use of WordPress, advising on ways to make the infrastructure more resilient and explore open-source tools and platforms beyond WordPress. If you want to start a larger strategic conversation about how we may be able to help, reach out to us!

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We are proud to support this year's OE Global Conference taking place in Brisbane, Australia, November 13-17th. Community is at the heart of what we do as an independent hosting company in Higher Education, and we are excited to be part of this wonderful event again this year.

The key part of our collaboration with OE Global is the 'Conference of the Air' - a radio offering that runs alongside the formal conference schedule:

Conference of the AirConference of the Air OEGlobal 2024 About Schedule RecordingsAlan Levine, Director of Global Community at OE Global, shares his vision for what's ahead in his recent post:

"For OEGlobal 2024 we are rolling out a new concept on an old medium… radio. When was the last time (or likely never for some) that you turned in a radio receiver to listen to music, news? For this year’s conference we are trying out transmitted audio aka radio over the internet as what we are calling “Conference of the Air”.

Extending the reach and participation opportunity for the OEGlobal conference as in previous years includes a selection of live-streamed keynotes/major sessions and a few “from the conference floor” streams. This benefits those in the regions unable to travel. In a turn-around for a part of the world that extends itself to participate in North American / European events, the timing to view live events originating in Australia has challenges."

The conference programme showcases the huge range of work happening on the open web all across Higher Education just now, and this further emphasis just how important open infrastructure, governance, policy and practice has become. So if you are not able to travel to Australia to take part in person, the Conference of the Air format offers an opportunity to tune in and connect with like-minded colleagues.

Join us and listen in as we explore new research, case studies and advances from across a global community. Here's how to take get involved:

Explore the Conference of the Air schedule:
Go to the online schedule which shows what’s on each day and links to the recordings and further conference information. The URL to bookmark is https://listen.reclaimed.tech/oeglobal .

Listen to live sessions
All you need is a web browser. Tune in directly via the schedule or simply head over to to DS106Radio and enjoy. You can listen to the sessions live or catch the recordings (and transcripts, too!) .

Join in the conversation
Head over to OE Global Connect and join in the conversation. Anyone active or interested in the global Open Education movement is welcome to sign up here and to contribute to discussions in this community. All content is public to read, an account is needed to reply.

Tell your friends
There is no need to register and everyone is welcome. Simply tune in and join the conversation. Share the link https://listen.reclaimed.tech/oeglobal .

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December 2024 - Raising Default VersionIn early December 2024 we will be changing the default PHP version on all our cPanel servers, from PHP 8.0 to PHP 8.1. Only the default command-line PHP and sites set to "inherit" the PHP version will be impacted by this change; all other sites with a specified PHP version will remain using that PHP version.

December 2025 - Raising Default VersionIn December 2025, in order to better align ourselves with PHP's timeline of supported versions (https://www.php.net/supported-versions.php), we will be switching the default PHP version from PHP 8.1 (the version we will have switched to in December 2024) to PHP 8.2; likewise, only the PHP CLI and sites set to "inherit" will be impacted by this change, with sites using a specified PHP version remaining un-impacted.

End-of-Year 2025 - Removal of PHP 7.3 & 7.4Before EOY 2025 we plan to have PHP 7.3 fully removed from our cPanel servers. Actual dates of removal will be communicated once the timeline is more defined, and removal of PHP 7.4 will follow afterwards at an unspecified time.

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Reclaim Hosting is excited to announce the newest Reclaim Cloud Installer, OpenWebUI!

Meredith and Taylor talked through the installer and a small demo last Friday Oct 18th to showcase the new installer

We've had some interest in working with Open Learning Language Models as AI is becoming more of a hot topic these days, so we also did a stream around larger open language models as well

Check them out to learn more about OpenLLMs and hosting OpenWebUI on Reclaim Cloud.

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This week Team Reclaim is heading to the airwaves for some spooky radio on DS106 Radio.

Following the success of this year's DS106 Radio Summer Camp, which brought together over 100 participants for a week of professional development on the radio, we are ready to jump back on air for a bit of a radio reunion - and everyone is welcome!

Our team loves radio and it's a great way to have fun for remote teams. It’s engaging, not screen based, it’s synchronous and at the same time gives everyone space to do other stuff whilst listening. There are different ways to get involved:

Share your favourite halloween tunes #ds106radio and we’ll play your tunes
Join us for a chat on the radio with other Reclaim folk, chat about what you are working on, share scary stories.. And have fun!
If you are an established DS106 Radio DJ, then this is your invitation to get on the radio as a host, spin up the tunes and invite special guests to chat with on air.

Tune in
All you need is a web browser. Tune in to DS106Radio and enjoy.

Join in the conversation
Chat in our Discord community, and use the #ds106Radio hashtag on Mastodon.

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How do you get from a single WordPress blog to building pages with students across a school or institution? Or how do you empower students on the open web using tools like OpenLab?

This case charts the success story of the OpenLab at the University of New Haven, which started as a small passion project and has grown significantly with grant funding from the Davis Educational Foundation. Find out what has happened since and how this initiative has benefited students and faculty in Higher Ed.

One of the ingredients for success for this project was to start with a single site in 2019, designed to support an experimental course called the Digital Humanities Lab (or DH Lab). This one-credit course was taught collaboratively by six faculty members, and the presentations were published on the website. This made the work in the classroom visible to a wider community.

Everything changed in 2020 during the pandemic, when OpenLab was used to support a course offered to all incoming students at the university called Pandemic as Social Mirror. As the number of students enrolled in the course grew, new faculty were added as collaborators on the site, which fostered online engagement during a time of social distancing. Truly interactive models of learning and teaching helped empower students across different disciplines. WordPress became a foundational tool for both students and faculty, and the pioneering templates developed for the OpenLab site lowered the bar to entry.

Inspired by the potential of OpenLab and similar Open Educational tools, a successful grant funding application supported faculty in transforming courses through Open Pedagogy. The site for the Open Pedagogy Project showcases this innovative approach, resulting in transformative and inclusive learning in partnership with students.

Mary Isbell tells the story :Curious to learn more about how CBOX OpenLab is used at the University of New Haven? Here's Mary Isbell, Associate Professor and Assistant Dean for Student Recruitment and Retention, sharing her perspective on getting institutional buy-in and winning the hearts and minds of colleagues along the way:

Find out moreWe are proud that our Managed Hosting service supports projects like the CBOX OpenLab at the University of New Haven. Managed Hosting covers a range of projects, large and small, for your organization or community, including WordPress Multisite, ReclaimEDU and Managed cPanel Hosting all made possible thanks to our world-class support and dedicated cloud infrastructure.

Running Commons in a Box (CBOX)
WordPress Multisite: What to Consider when Getting Started
Managed Hosting
Technical help and support

Putting CBOX Openlab to the testOpenLab at the University of New HavenCBOX-OL LogoMore Reclaim Case StudiesDo you have a story to tell or a project that you think would be a good fit for a Reclaim Case Study? Get in touch and let us know!

Simon Fraser University Bulk Shared Hosting: A Reclaim Case StudySuzanne Norman, Faculty of Communication, Art and Technology at Simon Fraser University (SFU), and Lecturer and Industry Liaison, and Director of SFU Publishing Workshops, shares why and how she helps her students get their own space online with Reclaim Hosting. Read the case study.

ReclaimEDU: A Reclaim Case StudyFor our second Reclaim Case Study production, we wanted to pull from the knowledge and experience of our team to give you a deeper look at Reclaim's latest and greatest... ReclaimEDU! You've heard about what ReclaimEDU is— our new multiregion cloud hosting service for .edu sites— but we thought you should also know how we got here. Read the case study.

Our case studies offer quick insights into practice and products, helping you make the most of open tools and infrastructure. With practical examples and take aways to help you navigate your own projects, these case studies offer a way to share practice, celebrate impact and contribute to the community.

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Hello and welcome to your quick mid-month summary of all things important and upcoming across our community:

News World Class Support - Thanks, Jason Teitelman!Our support is what sets us apart and we are proud of the team behind the tickets who work tirelessly to answer questions, trouble shoot problems and ensure your domain remains safe day in, day out, 365 days a year. Customer Support Specialist Jason Teitelman joined our team a year ago and we are so proud of all he has achieved. Thanks, Jason, you rock!

October Community Chat: Chatting about Web archiving with the folks from Webrecorder!On Wednesday, October 16th at 12pm ET, we'll be joined byAlan Levine to chat with us about the upcoming OEGlobal conference, which will be happening November 13-15 in Brisbane! We’ll also share some plans we are cooking up to bring the conference from Brisbane right to your neck-of-the-woods.
RSVP for the Community Chat here.

OpenEd24We were excited to head to OpenEd24, from Oct 8-10 in Providence, RI & online. This year's theme was 'It’s About Time' - reflecting that in-person attendance at this wonderful event for the first time since 2019. Our session, headed up by Taylor Jadin and Pilot Irwin was all about reclaiming our socials, and you can catch up with it now.

Reclaim RoundupSubscribe to our free monthly Roundup and don't miss out on the best GIF game on the open web (and yes, important service updates, security news and free events, too!).

Reclaim TV GuideThis month, tune in toReclaim.TV, live on Fridays at 10am ET:

October 18th - University of Tube (U Tube) with special guest, Rachel Winchester, the President of the University of Tube. She'll talk about this brand new University and all their offerings for students.
October 25th - The Future of Multidimensional Scholarship with Amanda Licastro about the future of multidimensional scholarship! Increasingly scholars are using immersive technologies to provide enhanced access to cultural heritage objects, as well as designing immersive environments as pedagogical spaces for the recreation of historical and literary sites.

And while you're waiting for these streams to premiere, catch up on shows with Reclaim TV On Demand:

Looking ahead to OpenEd24 with Pilot & Taylor, who are heading to OpenEd24 the following week

St. Olaf and WPMS Blocks! Bret Farley is joining us to talk through his exploration and customizations he and his team worked through to allow for St Olaf to create a custom WPMS instance for their school.

You can see the updated schedule at any time by checking out events.reclaimhosting.com!

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Community Chats are a chance for our community to get together once a month in an informal setting and connect about different web technologies, working with Reclaim Hosting products, or discussing anything else that might be trending in higher ed.

So whether you are a new admin finding your feet, an enthusiastic early adopter keen to learn more or someone who's tinkering with new tools on the open web, this is a friendly group committed to peer-learning and sharing both what works (and what doesn't!).

You don't have to be an expert to take part and if you have lots of questions or are keen to find a solution to a problem you have been working on, you are most welcome to bring these along. Outside of the monthly chats, our Discord server is a social space dedicated to chatting about everything from running a Domain of One's Own to experimenting with Wordpress Multisite, so if you haven't yet said hello, join us this month to get started.

The chat topic is chosen by the Reclaim team and announced a few weeks in advance. Community Chats are completely free, open for anyone to attend, and a great chance to get to know folks from other schools that might be running projects similar to yours.

Register for the next Community Chat: October 11th @ 10amThis month we’ll have some WordPress Multisite experimentation through the work at St Olaf. Bret Farley is joining us to talk through his exploration and customizations he and his team worked through to allow for St Olaf to create a custom WPMS instance for their school.

Learn more about Bret Farley: https://github.com/Mr-RoBret/

Watch the stream over at Reclaim TV, or catch the recording later on archive.reclaim.tv or our YouTube channel!

Community Chats – Reclaim EdTechReclaim EdTechCatch up with all the goodnessRecordings from previous Community Chats are available on Reclaim TV. These recordings, packed with expert know-how and open resources covering a huge range of topics, are a rich resource for our community that grows year on year!

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We're super excited to head to OpenEd24, OcT 8-10 • Providence, RI & Online. This year's theme is 'It’s About Time' - reflecting that in-person attendance at this wonderful event for the first time since 2019. It's definitely going to be a special occasion and the program is packed with interesting sessions.

We're excited to contribute a session all about reclaiming our socials, and this is certainly a timely topic. Our session, headed up by Taylor Jadin and Pilot Irwin, will cover:

using federated social networks for professional development, dissemination and networking;
evaluating how engaging with different social networks aligns with their values and competencies;
exploring belonging and engagement via a visitors/residents model;
apply lessons learnt and practical know how to your own personal, professional or institutional social media use.

Why now?Social media platforms are an important channel for advocacy and knowledge sharing in Open Education. In the last few years however we have witnessed these social spaces becoming increasingly polarized, privatized and exploitative. Weller reflects that whilst Inger has commented “Please stop encouraging academics to use social media as a way to create research impact and engagement”. [Social media is] toxic, a mess and that takes all the fun out of it. But it would also seem odd not to use digital networks as a means to disseminate, engage and build community if those are aspects of your [work].

So where do we take our projects and resources to share? Projects like Equity Unbound pioneer intentional hospitality online through community activities and events and offer an inspirational example for dedicated communities - but no easy to adopt blueprint for individual practitioners or Open Education teams.

In order to navigate these fragmented spaces, we need to use critical digital and data literacy to empower engagement and amplify diverse voices. By sharing practical examples and how-to this session will enable participants to explore and evaluate engagement strategies for themselves whilst building confidence in new social spaces online. Our session will provide resources and strategies designed to help participants navigate an increasingly fragmented and contested social media landscape.

Oh, and did we mention conference swag?! Come and find out to get your hands of some of the best stickers and postcards around (all designed in collaboration with the one and ONLY Bryan Mathers, whose Fabulous Remixer Machine recently one the OE Global Award for Open Reuse / Remix / Adaptation!)

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This week's OE Gobal Awards were an exciting event for everyone in Open Education, and this year's list of nominees was HUGE! In fact, in 2024 the Open Awards for Excellence received 120 nominations from people in 29 different countries.

The eagle-eyed amongst you may spot that we at Reclaim Hosting threw our hat into the ring this year, sharing our work all about Reclaiming our Socials as part of the nomination process. Although unfortunately our entry wasn't short-listed for an award (better luck next time!), we were greatly inspired to see all the individuals and projects who did make it... and we send our congratulations to all nominees and winners this year! You rock!

Special Congratulations go to... Amongst the worthy winners is long-time collaborator Bryan Mathers' and his Fabulous Remixer Machine! Bryan won the Open Reuse / Remix / Adaptation Award this year and we are so excited to see his work recognised! Congrats, Bryan, from everyone at Reclaim!

If you haven't come across his wonderful project yet, get inspiration from these quotes from the award reviewers:

It’s rare for someone with such a talent for drawing and illustration to make their work available so openly and freely. As Bryan also has a background in Computer Science, it’s almost unheard of for someone to create something so unique across the technical/artistic divide!

Also recognised with a Lifetime Achievement Award was Emeritus Professor Martin Weller, Open University, UK, whose influential blog The Ed Techie is one of the most popular blogs hosted on Reclaim's infrastructure, and we are proud to see Martin's huge contribution to our field recognised:

Martin Weller’s impact on and contributions to open education over his career at the Open University and ongoing in his post retirement era are here recognized by the OEGlobal Board of Directors with a Lifetime Achievement award.

A big Hip Hip Hurrraaay from Team Reclaim and congrats to you, Martin!

We hope that like us you find plenty of inspiration as you explore this year's winners .

Finally, big kudos to Alan Levine and everyone at OE Global for putting together such a wonderful celebration of all things open!

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Hello and welcome to your quick mid-month summary of all things important and upcoming across our community:

News Welcome to new clients!Our team has decades of experience in instructional technology, and we know what works (and also what doesn’t and why). We’ve worked with hundreds of institutions in the US, Canada and Europe, talking the talk and walking the walk of supporting staff and students on campus and in the cloud.
Explore what we do and get involved.

September Community Chat: Chatting about Web archiving with the folks from Webrecorder!On Wednesday September 18th at 12pm ET, we are delighted to be joined by the Webrecorder team to chat about web archiving! We'll also be talking about Browsertrix, their newest open-source tool to make archiving easy.
RSVP on the events calendar here!

Recent upgrades to our Client Area PortalA quick reminder that our Client Area Portal https://portal.reclaimhosting.com was upgraded on July 30, 2024, to increase security and bring new features to our billing system and we shared a quick overview of the upgrade. If you have any questions, please follow these steps to get in touch with our support team.

Fall Workshop: Domain of One's Own & WordPress Multisite 101 (October 01-02)The fall DoOO/WPMS workshop is getting closer! This virtual event will take place on Tuesday, October 1st and Wednesday, October 2nd, starting at 12 pm ET each day and ending at 5 pm ET. We'll provide both applied training and concrete examples of both administering and teaching with Domain of One’s Own and WordPress Multisite, along with one-on-one time with Reclaim Hosting, as well as other present institutions.

The workshop is broken up into two distinct days. Day 1 will be dedicated to getting you comfortable administering and troubleshooting Domain of One’s Own, and Day 2 will focus on WordPress Multisite. You can sign up for either or both days, whatever piques your interest! Check out the events calendar for registration and ticket info, and a more in-depth breakdown of each day's agenda.

Check out a preview of what's in store on ReclaimTV in our special episode Looking ahead to next month's workshop! with Pilot & Taylor.

Reclaim TV GuideThis month, tune in toReclaim.TV, live on Fridays at 10am ET:

September 20 - OpenLab at the University of New Haven with Taylor and special guest Mary Isbell
September 27 - Making a simple Docker container with Taylor & Pilot

And while you're waiting for these streams to premiere, catch up on shows with Reclaim TV On Demand:

You can see the updated schedule at any time by checking out events.reclaimhosting.com!

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We are excited to welcome new clients every week - welcome! As our community is growing and new schools join our Domain of One's Own program, ReclaimEDU and Reclaim Cloud services, here's a quick guide to help you get ready for the new academic year:

New here? Get started If you are just getting started, our support portal is the best place to begin. This is where you'll find documentation, support resources and answers to frequently asked questions. There's always a human being at the end of our support ticket, so reach out if you need further help.

Top tip: For new admins we are running a dedicated Domain of One’s Own and WordPress Multisite workshop. The workshop will provide both applied training and concrete examples of both administering and teaching with Domain of One’s Own and WordPress Multisite, along with one-on-one time with Reclaim Hosting, as well as other present institutions.
Register now.

Join our communityOur team has decades of experience in instructional technology, and we know what works (and also what doesn’t and why). We’ve worked with hundreds of institutions in the US, Canada and Europe, talking the talk and walking the walk of supporting staff and students on campus and in the cloud.

We offer dedicated training for your administrators, instructional designers and academic staff via virtual training sessions supported by documentation and resources;
We curate a year-round program flex courses, community chats, technology showcase sessions, expert voices and events;
We provide peer-support and networking via our community hub on Discord, which is free to join and open to all customers.

Keen to learn more? Explore what we do and get involved.

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As our community is growing, we are onboarding new admins from schools adopting our services and to help you prepare for the new semester, we are running a virtual workshop focused on Domain of One’s Own and WordPress Multisite!

The workshop will provide both applied training and concrete examples of both administering and teaching with Domain of One’s Own and WordPress Multisite, along with one-on-one time with Reclaim Hosting, as well as other present institutions.

The workshop is broken up into two distinct days. Day 1 will be dedicated to getting you comfortable administering and troubleshooting Domain of One’s Own, and Day 2 will focus on WordPress Multisite. Both days will start out at 12pm ET and end by 5pm ET. You can sign up for either or both days, whatever piques your interest!

On Day 1, which is focused around Domain of One’s Own, you can expect to learn about:

The systems that power DoOO and how they work together
Tools used to manage users and accounts in DoOO
Troubleshooting broken sites and what to do when things aren’t working
Building engagement and growing your DoOO initiative sustainably

On Day 2, the WordPress Multisite focused day, you can expect to learn about:

The basics of administering WordPress Multisite
Customizing your multisite with themes and plugins
Building your Multisite out to best support your goals
Workflows that will save you time and effort

We'll be taking a look at the admin systems behind each platform, how to troubleshoot and build sustainable workflows, and more.

You can register for a single day of the workshop for $195 per person, or both days at $350 per person on our events calendar here.

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Thank you everyone for making the first radio summer camp event happen! We had a blast! It's been a fantastic week of shows, stories and summer tunes! Let's wrap up proceedings with a HUGE thank you and a quick reminder about how to catch up with some of the goodness you may have missed.

A big thank you to all our speakers and guest DJsThis event wouldn't have happened without all the amazing speakers and guest DJs involved. It's been fabulous to have you all on air and we salute you! From lively chat on Discord and Mastodon to sharing resources and reading we appreciate everyone who contributed to this amazing week!

Catch up on sessions and resourcesYou can listen to the session recordings (and find transcripts, too!) via the online schedule. That’s also where we are posting links to resources and references in the description for each session. Listen to the magic and relive some camp moments.

Blog or Die! In the true spirit of our closing plenary, blogging about camp is happening! We are collating posts for you to explore, and here are some to get you started:

Paul Bond Live from Stellar Records
Todd Conway Sounds of the Grand Canyon
Mark Corbett Wilson My Summer Camp
Maren Deepwell ... we did it again!
Jim Groom previewed the Summer Camp
Christina Hendricks' Values-based tugging
Martin Weller DS106Radio Summer camp – the partial attention conference

If you have a post you'd like to add to the list, simply post it on the dedicated summer camp channel on Discord or tag it #ds106RadioSummerCamp on social media.

DS106Radio #4lifeThere's been a lot of interest this week for more regular shows on the radio, and the established DJs on DS106 have risen to the challenge... and blogged about it! So if you are interested, this post is a great starting point.

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Coming up next week, Reclaim will begin rolling out PHP 8.3 across all cPanel servers. Once it's added to your server, you'll be able to select it as the preferred PHP version for a given site/domain using the MultiPHP Manager tool. This rollout will happen on Tuesday, August 20.

The current default version of PHP on our servers (called the "Inherit" version in MultiPHP Manager) is v8.0 – when you set up a new domain or subdomain, that's what'll be used unless you change it on purpose.

PHP 8.0 will continue to be the default version of PHP for the time being, so if you want to use PHP 8.3 on your site, you will need to choose that version yourself. We have a support guide on how to do this available here: Changing Your PHP Version in cPanel.

Note that certain PHP extensions, like ImageMagick/Imagick, may not have been updated for PHP 8.3 compatibility yet. When those updates become available, we will apply them. However, until that time, some applications that depend on those extensions, like WordPress, may not function as expected.

By default, your application should remain on its current version, so you should not experience any issues with extension compatibility unless you choose to switch to 8.3. If you are trying to run an application using PHP 8.3 and experiencing issues, we recommend switching to a lower PHP version in order to make sure the extensions you need are still compatible.

If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to Support.

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Hello and welcome to your quick mid-month summary of all things important and upcoming across our community:

Upgrade complete!We are happy to report that the planned upgrades to our Client Area Portal https://billing.reclaimhosting.com were successfully completed at the start of this month. To help you get familiar with the improved system, we've put together a quick overview post which outlines the steps you need to take. If you have further questions, please follow these steps to get in touch with our support team.

Happening this week: DS106 Radio Summer CampWe are very excited that our first ever radio only conference, the DS106Radio Summer Camp, is happening this week. New to the concept? Read our quick primer post to find out what's on and how to get involved: So... what's a radio conference?!.

We have a packed schedule with speakers and guest DJs from across our community. Check out the DS106Radio Summer Camp Schedule and register. It’s free to attend, and registration will remain open during the event. So why not register and check out live sessions, recordings and resources.

Our usual schedule of community chats and Reclaim TV is not happening during this event, so why not join in the fun on the radio instead.

In other newsGreetings from Reclaim!At the end of July was Reclaim Hosting‘s 11th anniversary, crazy how time flies when you are providing a range of infrastructure options for higher ed and beyond. On his blog, Jim celebrates this milestone with brand new artwork showcasing all the amazing projects and services that take us from strength to strength in our second decade #4life!

Conference SeasonWe are on the road and attending conferences this month. Jim and Meredith have been meeting up with some of the community members in Washington DC and Arlington VA at WP Campus and DH2024!

If you've missed the fun, catch up with our WP Campus ,stream on Reclaim TV.

Changes to subdomainsNow that the upgrades to our Client Area Portal are complete, our focus is on improving security for all our customers. As part of these improvements, we will no longer be offering .reclaim.hosting subdomains as primary domains for new Shared Hosting signups from Jul 31, 2024. Any existing Shared Hosting account that uses a .reclaim.hosting subdomain as their primary domain will be unaffected, and you will still be able to add *.reclaim.hosting subdomains to use as add-on development URLs on Shared Hosting accounts if desired.

Fall Workshop - Domain of One's Own & WordPress Multisite 101Reclaim Hosting is excited to be running another virtual workshop this fall focused on Domain of One’s Own and WordPress Multisite! The workshop will be running Tuesday October 1st and Wednesday October 2nd, starting at 12pm ET each day and ending at 5pm ET. We'll provide both applied training and concrete examples of both administering and teaching with Domain of One’s Own and WordPress Multisite, along with one-on-one time with Reclaim Hosting, as well as other present institutions.

Reclaim TV GuideThis month, tune in toReclaim.TV, live on Fridays at 10am ET:

August 16 - No stream this week, but you can tune in for the final day of DS106Radio Summer Camp!
August 23 - Reclaim TV: Retro Computing 3 – Rise of the Machines
August 30 - Reclaim TV: Make your own radio station

Catch up on streams from earlier this month:

August 02 - Reclaim TV: Live from WP Campus!
August 09 - Reclaim TV: Get ready for Summer Camp!

You can see the updated schedule at any time by checking out events.reclaimhosting.com!

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It’s online conferencing…. but not as you know it. Imagine summer camp, on the radio, connecting with friends old and new as you tell stories around the campfire, reflecting on the year that’s been and learning a whole lot along the way.

Well folks, it's finally here: DS106Radio Summer Camp is go! On Monday we are starting our week long EdTech extravaganza on the radio and if you'd like a preview of what's in store and learn how to take part, then join us tomorrow, Friday, 9th August, on Reclaim TV at 10am ET. Watch the stream over at Reclaim TV, or catch the recording later on archive.reclaim.tv or our YouTube channel!

How to take partHere is what you need to know to make the most of the event:

Explore the camp schedule
Go to the online schedule which shows what’s on each day, starting Monday, August 12th and ending on Friday, August 16th (there's also a quick overview for the week).

Listen to live sessions
All you need is a web browser. Tune in to DS106Radio and enjoy. You can listen to the sessions live or catch the recordings (and transcripts, too!) which will be made available via the online schedule. That’s also where we are posting links to resources and references in the description for each session.

Join in the conversation
Chat with other participants in the dedicated channel in our Discord community, and use the #ds106RadioSummerCamp hashtag on Mastodon.

Sit at the campfire
At the end of each day at camp guest DJs take over DS106Radio for social campfire sessions and they are also included in the online schedule.

Bring a friend
Registration remains open throughout, so please encourage colleagues and friends to join in and register.

Support for Speakers
If you are a speaker, check the event calendar invite for your session for the link to join your speaker session. Your session will be moderated by a member of Team Reclaim.

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Turns out a few days ago was Reclaim Hosting‘s 11th anniversary, crazy how time flies when you are providing a range of infrastructure options for higher ed and beyond. Recently Meredith Huffman and I sat down with Bryan Mathers to try and map all the different products and services we offer. The beauty of these sessions is that they often lead to new ways of framing Reclaim Hosting, and this meeting did not disappoint. We came up with the overarching theme of visiting various products as if they were places, and the postcards become the key element for visually capturing their essence:

Visual map of places you can visit in the land of Reclaim Hosting

Back of each postcard: Greetings from Reclaim Hosting

Each card has the same background, and these postcards become physical elements we can give out at events like WP Campus and DH2024, both of which Meredith and I will be attending this week and next, respectively. So, anyway, here are the various postcards with each of the products, so awesome!

Domain of one’s Own

Domain of One’s Own

The industrial strength of WordPress Multisite hosting

Managed cPanel Hosting – pick your source

cPanel hosting, more generic remote

Some old gold Reclaim Cloud visuals

ReclaimEDU and Managed Hosting “Offload your dread…”

ReclaimEDU – a visualization of how our failover system works

ReclaimPress – the very bold label

ReclaimPress- because your WordPress site is your baby

A more abstract Andy Warhol-inspired record that came out of RclaimPress but can really be used across products like WPMS, ReclaimCloud, ReclaimPress, etc.

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Bryan Mathers is at it again with his Remixer

While the Learning Management System may not be dead, I certainly feel better when it’s not around. In fact, the ds106radio Summer Camp from August 12th through the 16th is embedded in the idea that doing edtech is anything but isolating and depressing. The schedule highlights just that fact, with sessions about everything from the Austerity Blues to Dream Teams and Apollo 13s. And the platform? The open and free airwaves of the mighty ds106radio. I’ll get things going each morning with some impromptu radio with musings about such topics as “What is art?” and “Why you can’t kill what’s already dead.” This format allows for folks to tune in as they like and enjoy a frictionless experience all the while. Major kudos to Maren Deepwell for organizing the summer camp so seamlessly, and creating a free and accessible event that is open and available to anyone interested—my favorite kind of open! If you’re interested in playing along you can register here for reminders and updates or just listen in when the time comes.

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We're reaching out today with a reminder about the planned work coming up for our Client Area Portal on https://portal.reclaimhosting.com. One week from now, on Tuesday, July 30, 2024, we will be upgrading our billing software to increase security and bring new features to our billing system.

As part of this, we will be migrating the Client Area portal to a new URL. With this migration and update, you may see a change to the layout of your Client Area. Your services (hosting plans or domain name registrations) will not be impacted during this maintenance and upgrade. Finally, the new URL for our Client Area after the migration and users will automatically be redirected. The new location will be https://billing.reclaimhosting.com.

This work will be here soon. As we get closer, here are key dates to be aware of.

MONDAY, JULY 29 & BEFORE

The Client Area portal will be online and available through Monday July 29. If you have anything you need to do with the Client Portal, such as purchasing new plans, renewing your existing plan, or paying outstanding invoices, please make sure to do it by the 29th.

If your Shared Hosting renewal is due after July 31, and you have not paid your renewal invoice by the time of the migration, a new renewal invoice will be automatically created in the new billing system. We recommend renewing prior to the migration to avoid any confusion from duplicate invoices.

TUESDAY, JULY 30

On Tuesday July 30, the Client Area portal will be unavailable and offline for logins and account management as we prepare for and begin the work. This will have the following effects:

You will not be able to access or pay invoices during this time. Please take this into account if you expect to be paying an invoice or renewing your account towards the end of the month.
Your hosted websites will not be offline during this time, but you will be unable to sign into cPanel through the Client Portal.
You will not be able to purchase new hosting plans or domain registrations during this time, in order to prevent lost orders during the upgrade.

WEDNESDAY, JULY 31 & AFTER

There are certain steps you will need to take once the work completes, starting on & after July 31, 2024. We are in the process of updating our existing documentation to reflect the look & workflow of the new system. Once the updated guides are published and available, we'll include them in an upcoming email.

Please be prepared for the following:

You will need to reset your Client Area password. You will be prompted to change the password when you go to log in. Documentation on this is in progress.
Your cPanel password will also change. If you use SFTP/SSH regularly you will also need to change this after July 30, 2024. Documentation on this is in progress.
You will need to update your payment details. Documentation on this is in progress.
Sub-accounts will change with the new system. If you have any sub-accounts or contacts on your Client Area account profile, please be aware that you will need to remake them after the billing system moves. In the new system, "Sub-accounts" will be replaced by "Users", and you will add them by inviting them through the new Client Portal and assigning them the correct permissions. Documentation on this is in progress.
Regarding open invoices:
- If your Shared Hosting renewal is due after July 31, and you have not paid your renewal invoice by the time of the migration, a new renewal invoice will be automatically created in the new system. You’ll receive an email when the new invoice is generated. If you are paying for a Shared Hosting renewal on or after July 31, please make sure you are paying the newer invoice through the new billing system.
- Managed Hosting and Domain of One's Own invoices will not be automatically re-created in the new system; we will continue to use the pre-existing invoices in order to ensure continuity for institutional purchasing departments. If you are paying a Managed Hosting or Domain of One's Own invoice on or after July 31, and the invoice was created before the migration, please coordinate with us directly regarding payment.

We also wanted to take this opportunity to inform you about an additional change that will go into effect on July 31. As we harden our servers and improve our security, we will no longer be offering *.reclaim.hosting subdomains as primary domains for new Shared Hosting signups.

Shared Hosting accounts that already use a .reclaim.hosting subdomain as their primary domain will be unaffected, and you will still be able to add .reclaim.hosting subdomains to use as add-on development URLs on Shared Hosting accounts if desired.

We are continuing to work diligently behind the scenes to make this move as smooth as possible, so stay tuned as we get closer to the date. We'll follow up with reminders to make sure you are aware and prepared for the upcoming changes to the system.

If you have any questions, please follow these steps to get in touch with our support team. Thanks again for your continued support of Reclaim Hosting!

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If you are looking for inspiration for the next academic year, or indeed carving out some time for your own professional development over the summer and you're not sure where to start, help is at hand:

Develop Institutional Capability for Digital EducationOver the past ten years we’ve become known for world-class hosting for Higher Ed and championing open software and platforms for instructional design.

What we’ve learned is that when it comes to digital education, things move fast and keeping up with the newest tools and technologies is an ongoing challenge. That’s why we offer tailor-made professional development and an expert community specifically for Educational Technologists, faculty and staff.

So the next time you invest in infrastructure, ask about how our expert team can help you and your institution we can help you find sustainable, cost-effective ways to support faculty and students with instructional technology skills development.

Keep up with what's happening in the communityYour go-to tool in your utility belt should be community.reclaimhosting.com!

This page has links to all the things we are up to, including Announcements, upcoming Reclaim Edtech events and Community Chats, Reclaim TV videos and streams and more.

Our next big event is the DS106 Radio Summer Camp, which is free and open to all, and happening August 12-16th. Register now.

If you prefer to get updates in your email inbox or RSS reader, we recommend checking out blog.reclaimhosting.com for periodic updates, and roundup.reclaimhosting.com for our monthly newsletter!

Find inspiration in fresh case studiesOur case studies offer quick insights into practice and products, helping you make the most of open tools and infrastructure. With practical examples and take aways to help you navigate your own projects, these case studies offer a way to share practice, celebrate impact and contribute to the community.

So far this year, we have published:

Simon Fraser University Bulk Shared Hosting: A Reclaim Case Study
Suzanne Norman, Faculty of Communication, Art and Technology at Simon Fraser University (SFU), and Lecturer and Industry Liaison, and Director of SFU Publishing Workshops, shares why and how she helps her students get their own space online with Reclaim Hosting. Read the case study.

ReclaimEDU: A Reclaim Case Study
For our second Reclaim Case Study production, we wanted to pull from the knowledge and experience of our team to give you a deeper look at Reclaim's latest and greatest... ReclaimEDU! You've heard about what ReclaimEDU is— our new multiregion cloud hosting service for .edu sites— but we thought you should also know how we got here. Read the case study.

From passion project to web empire: A ReclaimPress case study
Bryan Mathers was one of the first to join the ReclaimPress beta program, putting the platform through its paces. This case study tells his story... and shows you how ReclaimPress will help anyone get started or scale up their WordPress Empire. Read the case study.

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Our open call for submissions resulted in a real bumper crop of submissions and we are excited to share a preview of the full conference schedule with you now!

Once you register, you will get access to an interactive event site which shows the full schedule for each day, starting Monday, August 12th and ending on Friday, August 16th. For each session you will be able to click on the link to the live stream from the radio. You can listen to the shows live or catch the recordings (and transcripts, too!) and there'll be links to resources and references in the description for each session.

To listen in, all you need is a web browser. You'll also be able to chat with other participants in a dedicated channel in our Discord community, and using the #ds106RadioSummerCamp hashtag on Mastodon.

Schedule at a glance>This is our schedule for the camp as it stands at the moment, but keep in mind that some sessions may still move around as we co-ordinate with speakers and DJs from across different time zones.

If you are a presenter joining us to tell your story on the airwaves, for most sessions Team Reclaim will act as host and moderator. If you are a speaker look out for our calendar invite with further details.

Free registrationDS106 Radio Summer Camp is designed to free you from your screen and enjoy your summer whilst listening to inspiring stories around our virtual campfire. To take part, simply register and look out for the joining instructions the week before the event. During camp week, tune in to DS106 Radio and enjoy.

Subscribe to our monthly Roundup Newsletter and get security updates, event and community news from Team Reclaim in one beautiful email every month.

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Hello and welcome to your quick mid-month summary of all things important and upcoming across our community:

Announcements and blog postsComing up: Client Portal UpgradesOn July 30th we'll be upgrading our billing software and client management system. This blog post has all the details, but the long and short of it is that the Client Area portal will be unavailable on July 30th, and once the work is done, the URL will change (and be redirected) from portal.reclaimhosting.com to billing.reclaimhosting.com. This work won't affect your servers or take any of your websites offline, but you won't be able to access or pay any invoices due on the 30th and if you access any of your cPanels from the Client Portal, such as Shared Hosting accounts, those will also be unavailable. After the work is done (so, July 31st & later), you'll need to:

reset your Client Area passwords
update payment details
remake any sub-accounts currently on your billing account

Documentation on how to do this in the new system will be coming out over the course of July (and of course featured in this month's Roundup), and we'll share any updates over on our Breaking News blog. For now, all the current details can be found here, and you can always reach out to Support if you have any questions.

Security PSA: User Monitoring & Phishing AwarenessWith the rise of malicious vulnerabilities and threat activities targeting higher ed institutions, we want to remind everyone to be on the lookout for suspicious or unusual activity. Please keep an eye on your userlist and users, and if you notice anything concerning, reach out to Support immediately so we can take a look. Additionally, phishing continues to be a concern. Our blog post regarding a Disk Usage phishing campaign is still relevant, as these emails have made a recent resurgence. Read our recent update.

Community Chat: Building Community and Reclaiming our SocialsJoin us: July 17 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
This month we want to reflect on our journey to Reclaim our Socials! Let’s discuss how to build a community as well as the challenges involved, as well as what we’ve learned along the way. Register for Community Chats - it's free and everyone is welcome.

Summer Camp - last chance to submit your ideas for AugustThe Call for Speakers closes July 14th. We are excited to hear from you about all things open edtech, stories about how you are reclaiming your digital domain and the trials and tribulations you encountered along the way. Find out more about this free event and how to submit.

Reclaim TV GuideThis month, tune in toReclaim.TV, live on Fridays at 10am ET:

July 12 - Reclaim TV: Looking ahead to DS106 Summer Camp
July 19 - Reclaim TV: Castopod
July 26 - Reclaim TV: Reclaim is headed to WPCampus 2024!

Catch up on Reclaim TV on demand:

Reclaim TV: Bringing the Internet back to Windows 98

You can see the updated schedule at any time by checking out events.reclaimhosting.com!

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With the rise of malicious vulnerabilities and threat activities targeting higher ed institutions, we want to remind everyone to be on the lookout for suspicious or unusual activity. Please keep an eye on your userlist and users, and if you notice anything concerning, reach out to Support immediately so we can take a look.

Additionally, phishing continues to be a concern. Our blog post regarding a Disk Usage phishing campaign is still relevant, as these emails have made a recent resurgence.

You should not click any links you do not know in an email, and always verify that an email came from the correct sender. If you receive one of these alerts, please do not click any links in the email and let us know at support@reclaimhosting.com.

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Since we opened registration for our upcoming event, the DS106 Radio Summer Camp, folk have been getting in touch to ask what a radio-based conference might be and how it works to present and take part.

"We are familiar with the format of Reclaim Open or the Domains Conference, fully virtual, blended and in person... we have done hybrid! Synchronous! Asynchronous! But every conference format relies on some kind of visual, a video at least. So what's a radio conference?!"

Now, here at Reclaim we are no strangers to doing things differently. We are good at firsts! We are not afraid to go where others follow, and we blog about it along the way. So here's the concept unpacked:

DS106 Radio Summer Camp is designed to free you from your screen and enjoy your summer whilst listening to inspiring stories around our virtual campfire. To take part, simply register and look out for the joining instructions the week before the event. During camp week, tune in to DS106 Radio and enjoy.

You will have an interactive online programme which shows the full schedule for each day, starting Monday, August 12th and ending on Friday, August 16th. For each session you will be able to click on the link to the live stream from the radio. You can listen to the shows live or catch the recordings (and transcripts, too!) and there'll be links to resources and references in the programme description for each session. To listen, all you need is a web browser.

You'll also be able to chat with other participants in a dedicated channel in our Discord community, and using the #ds106RadioSummerCamp hashtag on Mastodon.

If you are a presenter joining us to tell your story on the airwaves, for most sessions Team Reclaim will act as host and moderator. So as a speaker all you need to do is to join a call via a conferencing platform. If you are keen to learn more about internet radio broadcasting, let us know when you register!

Call for Speakers and SubmissionsThe Call for Speakers is open until July 14th. We are excited to hear from you about all things open edtech, stories about how you are reclaiming your digital domain and the trials and tribulations you encountered along the way.

The themes for the event are:

Theme 1: Tell the story of your year … in words and/or music. Look back at the last academic year and share your highs and lows, what excited you and your students or colleagues;
Theme 2: What’s cooking on your campfire?! Pick this theme if you have a tasty (ed) technical innovation to share, lessons learnt or a question for our audience;
Theme 3: Open and federated! We are on a mission to reclaim our socials, and if you are interested in open or federated communities, networks, newsletters and more, this is your theme;
Theme 4: Radio ramble. Do you have something to share with the group… or something on your mind that you want to unpick… musings, idle ramblings, poetry slams and walking tours are welcome here.

It’s free to speak and everyone is welcome. Our schedule for the summer camp includes a number of activities and formats:

Speaker session: an hour of storytelling or interview with one speaker hosted by a moderator from Team Reclaim;
Discussion Session: discussion hour with 2-3 contributors talking about a common theme hosted by a moderator from Team Reclaim;
Music + Talk: Guests bring music or make requests, plus chat in an informal format, guest by a guest DJ or a moderator from Team Reclaim;
Open DJs & campfire socials (each day after the end of the formal schedule).

Submit a session.

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We have some exciting changes and improvements coming to our billing system!

Coming up on July 30, 2024, we are upgrading our billing software to increase security and bring new features to our billing system.

As part of this, we are migrating the Client Area portal to a new URL. With this migration and update, you may see a change to the layout of your Client Area. Your services (hosting plans or domain name registrations) will not be impacted during this maintenance and upgrade. Finally, the new URL for our Client Area after the migration, and users will automatically be redirected. The new location will be https://billing.reclaimhosting.com.

As we prepare for this upgrade, there are a few things we need you to keep in mind:

On July 29, 2024 the Client Area portal will be unavailable and offline for logins and account management. Your hosted websites will not be offline during this time. Users will also be unable to purchase new hosting plans or domain registrations. This will prevent any lost orders during the upgrade.
You must reset your Client Area password after July 30, 2024. You will be prompted to change the password when you log in.
Your cPanel password will also change. If you use SFTP/SSH regularly you will also need to change this after July 30, 2024
You will need to update your payment details after July 30, 2024.

If you have any sub-accounts you will need to recreate these accounts. The workflow for this will change within our new system. Please be on the lookout for further instructions on adding Sub-Accounts back to your account.

We are working diligently behind the scenes to update our documentation to keep you in the loop!

Stay tuned for more details as we get closer to the date to help keep you informed of all the exciting features coming soon.

If you have any questions, please follow these steps and get in touch with our support team. Thanks again for your continued support of Reclaim Hosting!

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As Reclaim continues to morph, I ‘ve been thinking a bit about working teams. One of the real joys—and possibly under appreciated privileges—I’ve had professionally is being part of really amazing teams, which often translates to working with great people. I was living in New York City in the late 90s, just in time to witness (many times first-hand) the NY Yankees 3-peat World Series championships in 1998, 1999, and 2000. Now it might be easy to dismiss this team given they were chock-full of money and talent (they’re the Yankees, after all), but turns out the Orioles had an even higher payroll with arguably as much talent in 1998. And also, remember the Mets!!!*

Beyond the money and individual stars there was something more at play—a sense of joyful commitment to the work married with talent made them something else all together. Even the leagues of folks who hate the Yankees would crack a little with that particular team—they were hard not to respect because they played as a team and the greatness transcended any one player. What’s not to love about an impossible infield play by hall of famer Derek Jeter to rob the opposition of a hit followed by an equally impressive stop from everyman utility player Scott Brosius. It was greatness all around; they made each other better and as a result were unstoppable for 3 straight years—a herculean feat in any sport. To boot, they seemed to be having fun all the while.

Now edtech is not Major League Baseball, and this comparison is flimsy at best, but the NY Yankees of that era were emblematic of a great team, and one I witnessed first hand.† And for me the key seemed to be joy, having both a shared purpose as well as a lot of fun with your teammates. I think that translates very well for me with the work I did as an instructional technologist at University of Mary Washington alongside many amazing folks, but in particular Martha Burtis, Andy Rush, Shannon Hauser, and Jerry Slezak. They’re folks I miss being around regularly, but when we were together in the bullpen (maybe the baseball metaphor does work) exploring the magic of the mid-2000s web for higher ed was undergirded by a lot of laughter, and thankfully not spoiled by the years of ~~million dollar~~ state salaries. I’ve talked about the magic of working at the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies (DTLT) on this blog extensively, so I will try and keep things moving along.

DTLT Reunion at Reclaim Open

My next team was in many ways taken from DTLT, as Tim Owens and I started Reclaim while working together there. We both eventually left the university, taking the newly minted graduate Lauren Hanks (Brumfield at that time) with us as we ventured into the unknown territory of Reclaim Hosting. We were a super small team for many years, it wasn’t until 2017 that we brought on Meredith Huffman (another fresh UMW alum). And with the addition of Chris Blankenship a couple of years after that (yet another UMW faithful!), we had the core of a team that would define the first 10 years of Reclaim Hosting.

Tim and Lauren in a recently Completed CoWork

This was quite an intense period as we stayed lean and grew quick, but at the same time it carried over a lot of the fun and experimentation of our time at UMW, only with a fraction of the meetings. On top of growing our shared hosting, Domain of One’s Own, and managed hosting significantly, we also had time to open up a CoWork space, a VHS store, and eventually Tim took over the arcade we built and spun it off into his own career—leaving the now civilized terrain of Reclaim. And not too long after Tim became the pinball wizard, Lauren left just this past September after realizing the previous eight years Reclaim was all she had known professionally. It was time for both to strike out for new territory, leaving old man bava to his devices. The contributions both Tim and Lauren made are too immense to list here, and in many ways I’ve not written either a proper goodbye on this blog for fear of letting either go—but I’ll save that discussion for my next appointment with Dr. Freud.‡

I’m not going to lie, I was a bit concerned this past fall and winter as I was saying goodbye to Lauren and buying out Tim’s remaining share of Reclaim Hosting, and my mental stated reflected that transition. At the same time, one of the things I underestimated was just how resilient and awesome the team we’ve been building over the last several years has become. Meredith and Chris have become the pillars of both support and infrastructure this new city on the hill was built upon, and in addition to that, bringing on Goutam Vijay Narang, Pilot Irwin, and Taylor Jadin almost three years ago now ensured a really solid base from which we could continue to provide the service our community was used to, while at the same to building community through avenues like ReclaimTV, Discord, Roundup Newsletter, and Reclaim the Blog—all of which we have never done to the same extent previously. In many ways we’re now getting the word out better than ever before, and it’s still retains the tone and humor of Reclaim always represented. Just 18 months ago we brought on Noah Dorsett who has done a phenomenal job helping us shore up security, helping us all sleep that much better at night. But when Tim and Lauren were coming to their end of their reign, Meredith stepped up to play and all around manager; Pilot stepped up to manage support like a star; and Chris remained Chris keeping everything online.

Team Reclaim at Reclaim Open

It is also worth noting, eight months after Noah came, we hired on Amanda Schmidt to buttress our growing Edtech group, which Taylor and Pilot were already helping us define. It has been truly rewarding to watch Edtech find its legs, part of which has been the push for community building, and we have become able to support Reclaim Cloud that much more effectively, as well as introduce new offerings such as ReclaimEDU and ReclaimPress, we’ve done anything but sit on our hands.

But when Lauren left there was a serious HR and operations gap that we got truly lucky to be able to bring on Maren Deepwell as a contractor, her impact to keeping the team focused and sharing her vast expertise and mentoring has been invaluable. When I had to more extensive time off she worked with Meredith and the entire Reclaim team to make sure everything remained on track, and we scarce missed a beat—that fact alone speaks volumes to how much we have grown with our current incarnation of Reclaim.

I think part of my musings here might be that I just finished up annual reviews, and it was amazing to see how happy folks are at Reclaim—that for me is the number one indicator of success. By that metric, we are by and large killing it. And our team is still growing, with a brilliant hire of superstar Jason Teitelman, whose has been an amazing fit to further reinforce out focus on all things support. And just this month we have added Cass le Fay into a hybrid support/infrastructure role to provide Chris some relief with all things sysadmin—long overdue.

I would be remiss if I did not end with one of the most impactful changes that has happened in just the last two months, bringing on Justin Webb as managing partner, to manage finances and bring some of his long-honed expertise in all matters IT to bear on Reclaim’s future. We have worked with Justin for more than 7 years as a consultant, after being colleagues at UMW for almost 7 more—so the ability to partner with a know entity who has seen the inner-workings of Reclaim for so many years was a true relief. As the reality of not being entirely alone takes hold, I can feel the pressure and dread turn once again to joy and possibility.

As Tim stepped away the infrastructure team felt that hit, just as Lauren’s departure had us scrambling organizationally, so bringing on both Maren and, six months later, Justin marks the beginning of yet another era of Reclaim that has me excited all over again. Managing growth and valuing our services appropriately has it’s real challenges, and given Reclaim was never the work of one person, the fact that we’ve built a team that’s as good, and arguably deeper, than the one we had out first ten years really has me excited for what’s to come. It’s all about the people, and Reclaim has made all the right moves!

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*If you look at MLB payrolls since 1998, the Yankees have consistently been amongst the biggest spenders, but that has led to only 1 championship in 23 years—although arguably 2 given the Astros cheated. So while money always matters, there was also something else at play with this group.

†It was also hard not to be drawn in by the Chicago Bulls of the mid-90s and the god-like talent of Jordan even if you were not a basketball fan. But that team seemed to struggle with the cult of Jordan—whereas the Yankees championships were not as predicated on the one superstar (in fact, the one superstar often is an albatross in baseball, A-Rod anyone?). Now this could be a difference of sports, granted, but Jordan’s persona and talent were so ridiculously great that it was hard for any other player on that team to get much of the glory, which is unfortunately still playing out between Pippen and Jordan. What’s more, Jordan and the Bulls made Basketball a global phenomenon, which no team or player has been able to do for baseball. In fact, I’m seeing the impact of Jordan’s footprint 30 years later with basketball’s immense popularity here in Italy.

‡I think the same was true of Shannon Hauser when she graduated and “left” UMW

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It’s an anthem in a vacuum on a hyperstation
Daydreaming days in a daydream nation

Not sure exactly what hyperstation means in the Sonic Youth song “Trilogy” quoted above, but I do love the way it sounds. Maybe it’s alluding to the future fact that Reclaim Hosting will create a “hyperstation” on Reclaim.tv. A regularly streaming daydream pushed through a make-believe vacuum tube out to a glowing web. I’m not sure that even makes any sense, but that’s what I hear and see in my mind’s eye. All this nonsense to say that Reclaim has been streaming pretty regularly for a while now to Reclaim TV, and I wanted to highlight a few of the recent streams, as a way to celebrate this development.

As a way to embrace the anachronistic web of vacuum tubes, I want to first point out the stream Taylor and I did featuring Protoweb:

a free public service that hosts historical Internet websites to demonstrate the Internet in it’s early days. It is also a community driven project consisting of volunteers with the goal of rebuilding and restoring early Internet services to offer a seamless browsing experience.

We were going to use it on my Windows 98 machine I have been playing around with, but I bricked that machine right before the stream, so Taylor used his MiSTer multi-system card to reproduce a Windows 95 machine, and it really is an impressive toy. It can re-create a wide-range of old consoles and computing systems, and it is not so much emulation as an engineering/programming feat to run many of those systems in their native form on a more compact, shared hardware. Now that I have a new Windows 98 machine running, it’s time to get it connected to the web to try Protoweb out, it really does get at the heart of what surfing the web used to be like.

Speaking of the retro web I also streamed last week about the “pain and pleasure” of returning to an old operating systems like Windows 98. It brings back a whole slew of prior knowledge, and reminds me how difficult even simple tasks could be with a bug-ridden system like Windows. Although, truth be told I am loving returning to this late 90s operating system, and have a few more streams to share on this experience for sure.

We also caught up with Stephen Downes a couple of weeks ago to get his take on cloud computing, and what his process has been as he moves more and more of his cpanel and/or VPS based sites to various cloud providers. Turns out he is a regular “consumer digest investigator” on the various cloud platforms,* and his ability to keep pace with the changes and use his own code, domains, and tools as his laboratory is remarkable. An edtech is many things, to be sure, but the ability to dig in on the infrastructure and make open source tools do your bidding is one definition I’m biased towards—Downes truly walks that walk with his own fleet of sites.

And coming in just a over an hour will be a discussion with “tell me again about my eyes” Tim Owens about how he is approaching marketing for the inimitable Reclaim Arcade—reconnecting with the OG Reclaimer.

And those are just the streams I have been involved with over the last month, there are many, many more accessible at archive.reclaim.tv that you can browse at your convenience, but here are a few I will highlight:

Taylor and Pilot caught up with special guest Quinn Dombroski (of whom Reclaim is a big fan) to talk about “Modeling Project Planning in DH throwugh Games.” Quinn is just too cool and obviously loves what they do, and the passion for teaching and learning is infectious.

Maren and Meredith catch up with another very special guest, namely Bryan M. Mathers, to talk about his early adoption of newest product ReclaimPress. As it so happens, Bryan was not only an early adopter based on his needs for visualthinkery.com and his own website, but also he created the Reclaim aesthetic—up to and including the art for ReclaimPress. In fact, the visual “From Passion Project to Web Empire” is in many ways the metaphor we needed to explain what this service does differently than cPanel hosting in one, elegant graphic. As usual Bryan takes our thought chaos turns them into a compelling and elucidating communique that folks can wrap their head around.

And if you’re wondering if the Reclaim Support team can have some fun, Taylor’s creation of “The Best Support on the Internet” game show highlights Reclaim’s deep comradery, playfulness, and, of course, hosting knowledge. And while a bit indulgent, the streams are most fun because we’ve given ourselves the freedom to explore and share whatever we’re working on at the time.

In fact, I am so excited about our ability to stream regularly on Reclaim TV is that I imagine it as a multimedia-rich and often communal blogging process. I have long had the dream of us creating a “TV Station” for Reclaim, and over the last 6-12 months that vision has become a reality and I could not be more thrilled with the collective effort that has made it possible. YEAH!!!

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*This is a paraphrasing of an Eric Likness comment during the live stream that was too good not to re-purpose here, so thanks again Eric, for being there!

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We're excited to announce another addition to the team at Reclaim! Cass le Fay recently joined Reclaim Hosting in the Escalated Support Specialist and Junior Systems Administrator position.

Cass has been in website hosting since 2018. He graduated from Tidewater Community College in Virginia Beach, VA with an Associates of Applied Science in Network Engineering. Discovering how much he enjoyed the world of the Linux Operating System and finding that hosting used it most often, he decided to give that a try. He got hooked into WordPress and dove deeper into Linux. He enjoys bringing together customer support and hosting in ways which can advance the web. In his spare time, he enjoys his many pets, messing around on his personal technology, and continuing to expand his knowledge in any direction that sparks his interest.

We're excited to have Cass on board! Feel free to say high in Discord or if you see him in tickets!

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Hello and welcome to your quick mid-month summary of all things important and upcoming across our community:

Announcements and blog postsRegistration and Call for Submissions now open! Our new summer event, the DS106 Radio Summer Camp, is now open for registration, speaker submissions and guest DJs. It's online conferencing... on the radio! So grab your headphones and join us in August for inspiration and practical know-how for the new academic year. It's free to attend and everyone is welcome. Register now.

Security PSA: Disk Usage Phishing Campaign: There continue to be an ongoing phishing campaign against Reclaim Hosting/Reclaim Hosting users. These phishing emails are disguised as legitimate cPanel disk usage reports. Check these important security reminders and if you receive one of these alerts, please do not click any links in the email and discard it. If you have any concerns, let us know at support@reclaimhosting.com.

Security PSA: TX-RAMP, NIST, and Compliance: We are excited to confirm that Reclaim Hosting is provisionally compliant with the TX-RAMP standard while pursuing full compliance. Read the full update on the blog.

Hot off the press: From passion project to web empire: A ReclaimPress case study. Read our newest case study featuring a look behind the scenes with Bryan Mather's, resources to help you get started with ReclaimPress and your invitation join the beta program today.

Don't miss out on the best GIF game on the web! Subscribe to our monthly round-up and get all the headlines once a month directly to your inbox.

Join this month's Community Chat: Blog Post Book Club – “Necessary FUD?”Register now: June 19 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm

It’s a blog post reading group, and YOU are invited! Give Tom Woodward’s recent post Necessary FUD? a read, then let’s talk about it. We’re interested in doing more discussions about blog posts or other thought-provoking writings on technology, education, and related topics. If you’ve got a suggestion for something to discuss next, or want to be part of leading the discussion, reach out to us on Discord or on the Community Forum!

Reclaim TV GuideThis month, tune in toReclaim.TV, live on Fridays at 10am ET:

June 14 - The Pain and Pleasure of Retro Computing with Windows 98
June 21 - Marketing Reclaim Arcade with Tim (featuring special guest Tim Owens!)
June 28 - A stream about how we run our streams

Catch up on Reclaim TV on demand:

Stephen Downes talks about his experiences with the cloud (featuring special guest Stephen Downes!)

You can see the updated schedule at any time by checking out events.reclaimhosting.com!

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Next week, we're trying out something new with our monthly Community Chats!

It’s a blog post reading group, and YOU are invited! Give Tom Woodward’s recent post Necessary FUD? a read, then let’s talk about it.

We’re interested in doing more discussions about blog posts or other thought-provoking writings on technology, education, and related topics. If you’ve got a suggestion for something to discuss next, or want to be part of leading the discussion, reach out to us on Discord or on the Community Forum!

If you aren't familiar, every month we host a video call on various topics that we call our Community Chats! Anyone is welcome, and the format is flexible and informal.

You can find out upcoming Community Chats on our event calendar. We also have recordings of all of our past community Chats, if you want to check them out!

We hope to see you there!

Date: June 19
Time: 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm ET
meet.reclaimhosting.com/community-chat

Sign up for Reclaim the Blog If you aren't signed up for email notifications already, you can get signed up below. We always send a reminder out a day before the next community chat.

Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.

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The Call for Submissions for our summer event is now open. It's free to attend and it's easy to submit a session. The deadline for submission, July 14th, is only a few weeks away.

This year, we are taken a new approach to conferencing, and instead of asking you to join us in a lecture theatre or on screen, we are heading to the airwaves for the first ever DS106 Radio Summer Camp.

Starting on Monday, August 12th, we’ll be taking to the airwaves with live shows featuring edtech storytelling, lively discussions and our year in music. Every day for a week there’ll be live sessions sharing adventures in Higher Education and beyond as we celebrate the end of this academic year and gather our energy for the new term. Jump into the cool, refreshing pool of DS106 inspiration!

How to take partDS106 Radio Summer Camp is designed to free you from your screen and enjoy your summer whilst listening to inspiring stories around our virtual campfire.

To take part, simply register and look out for the joining instructions the week before the event. During camp week, tune in to DS106 Radio and enjoy.

The themes for the event are:

Theme 1: Tell the story of your year … in words and/or music. Look back at the last academic year and share your highs and lows, what excited you and your students or colleagues;
Theme 2: What’s cooking on your campfire?! Pick this theme if you have a tasty (ed) technical innovation to share, lessons learnt or a question for our audience;
Theme 3: Open and federated! We are on a mission to reclaim our socials, and if you are interested in open or federated communities, networks, newsletters and more, this is your theme;
Theme 4: Radio ramble. Do you have something to share with the group… or something on your mind that you want to unpick… musings, idle ramblings, poetry slams and walking tours are welcome here.

It’s free to speak and everyone is welcome. Our schedule for the summer camp includes a number of activities and formats:

Speaker session: an hour of storytelling or interview with one speaker hosted by a moderator from Team Reclaim;
Discussion Session: discussion hour with 2-3 contributors talking about a common theme hosted by a moderator from Team Reclaim;
Music + Talk: Guests bring music or make requests, plus chat in an informal format, guest by a guest DJ or a moderator from Team Reclaim;
Open DJs & campfire socials (each day after the end of the formal schedule).

For most sessions, Team Reclaim will act as host and moderator, so all you need to do is to join a call via a conferencing platform. If you are keen to learn more about internet radio broadcasting, let us know when you register!

Submit a session.

Listen to the first summer camp broadcastEarlier this week, we were live on DS106Radio to share our excitement about the summer camp. We talk through how to take part, introduce the themes and session formats ... and play some fun tunes along the way. Thanks to everyone who listened in, sent us suggestions on the hashtag and signed up during the show.

If you missed us live, then here is the recording for your listening pleasure:

First DS106 Radio Summer Camp broadcast0:00/3425.0448981×

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As of May 2024, more than 474 million sites use WordPress and it continues to be one of the most popular platforms used in education. Over the past decade our team has worked with faculty and students on our pioneering ‘Domain of One’s Own’ program, helping them build the skills and capabilities to reclaim ownership and control over their online presence and we've seen WordPress not only become immensely popular, but also more and more complex.

If you are looking to deploy Wordpress at scale however building confidence for users in administrating of cPanel can be challenging. We know first hand just how hard and time consuming it can be to build internal capacity for faculty and students, so we developed a new, simplified Wordpress hosting solution that enables users to get started more quickly and easily than ever before: meet ReclaimPress.

As part of our development process, we went back not only to our Domain of One's Own program, but also the record store aesthetic that has been at the heart of Reclaim for the past decade: enter Bryan Mathers.

Watch Bryan on Reclaim TV tell the story of ReclaimPress:"Once you’ve got a visual language you can just keep using it to tell a crazy story. Reclaim has a really powerful visual language and so when we started to talk about ideas for ReclaimPress, that was our starting point. ... ReclaimPress is industrial, it's solid. How does this translate into the visual language? I really like this, its black and white strength, it's so solid and it's handmade."

"Just like the black and white logo, Reclaim's support is 100% human. The ReclaimPress visuals conveys that overlap, between the human, hand-made and industrial strength."

If you'd like to learn more about the story beyond the artwork, and how it was created, then tune in to Reclaim TV and watch a special episode in which Bryan tells the story:

Putting ReclaimPress to the testBryan was also one of the first to join the ReclaimPress beta program, putting the platform through its paces. Here is what he told us:

"I have some skin in the game here. I am one of the early adopters of ReclaimPress, and I have a software engineering background and I have a few sites that need hosting.. so I was curious about where ReclaimPress sits.

I have tried out Reclaim Cloud, which is so powerful, and I have always been a bit frustrated with cPanel, so ReclaimPress seems to hit the sweet spot. It's got the solidness I was looking for, for the sites that I don't ever want to go down.

So with my client hat on, I am thinking back ups are becoming important, monitoring is more important, and for someone like me who isn't a SysAdmin, it really hits the mark."

If you are keen to put ReclaimPress to the test, join the beta program today.

Key take awaysReclaimPress is specifically tailored to hosting WordPress sites, and we're hoping to make something that's fast, easy to use, and affordable.

We're taking what we've learned from Reclaim Cloud, and the power and flexibility of that platform, and adding a simple-to-use, WordPress-optimized management interface to it.

ReclaimPress is packed with features that will help anyone get started or scale up their WordPress Empire. You’ll have everything in one place, built in scalability, staging sites and flexible pricing, all on our high powered container based infrastructure with our top notch support.

Further reading and resourcesGetting started with ReclaimPress
Join the beta program
Technical help and support

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Imagine summer camp, on the radio, connecting with friends old and new as you tell stories around the campfire, reflecting on the year that’s been and learning a whole lot along the way.

Join us, this August live on DS106 Radio, as we go to camp. Starting on Monday, August 12th, we’ll be taking to the airwaves with live shows featuring edtech storytelling, lively discussions and our year in music. Every day for a week there’ll be live sessions sharing adventures in Higher Education and beyond as we celebrate the end of this academic year and gather our energy for the new term. Jump into the cool, refreshing pool of DS106 inspiration!

Join us as a speaker or a guest DJ live on air, or simply take your headphones, head outside into the sunshine and tune in. It's online conferencing…. but not as you know it.

DS106 Radio Summer Camp is free to attend for all, and we encourage you to bring a friend!

How to take partDS106 Radio Summer Camp is designed to free you from your screen and enjoy your summer whilst listening to inspiring stories around our virtual campfire.

To take part, simply register and look out for the joining instructions the week before the event. During camp week, tune in to DS106 Radio and enjoy.

Call for SpeakersSubmit your idea for a session on the radio now. The Call for Speakers is open. We are excited to hear from you about all things open edtech, stories about how you are reclaiming your digital domain and the trials and tribulations you encountered along the way.

The themes for the event are:

Theme 1: Tell the story of your year … in words and/or music. Look back at the last academic year and share your highs and lows, what excited you and your students or colleagues;
Theme 2: What’s cooking on your campfire?! Pick this theme if you have a tasty (ed) technical innovation to share, lessons learnt or a question for our audience;
Theme 3: Open and federated! We are on a mission to reclaim our socials, and if you are interested in open or federated communities, networks, newsletters and more, this is your theme;
Theme 4: Radio ramble. Do you have something to share with the group… or something on your mind that you want to unpick… musings, idle ramblings, poetry slams and walking tours are welcome here.

It’s free to speak and everyone is welcome. Our schedule for the summer camp includes a number of activities and formats:

Speaker session: an hour of storytelling or interview with one speaker hosted by a moderator from Team Reclaim;
Discussion Session: discussion hour with 2-3 contributors talking about a common theme hosted by a moderator from Team Reclaim;
Music + Talk: Guests bring music or make requests, plus chat in an informal format, guest by a guest DJ or a moderator from Team Reclaim;
Open DJs & campfire socials (each day after the end of the formal schedule).

Submit a session.

Call for volunteer DJsIf you are a regular or occasional DS106 radio DJ and you would like to take part in the radio summer camp, we’d love to have you on board. If you already have a regular slot, we’d love to include it in the summer camp schedule, or, if you prefer, we simply won’t schedule anything at the time so that you can continue your show as usual.

We’ll have time in the schedule for music and free-style campfire sessions and we’d love for you to play tunes solo or with guests as part of the summer camp.

Volunteer as a DJ.

A bit about DS106 radioInternet radio is not a new medium in open and distance education, and during the pandemic saw a resurgence as educators took to the airwaves on grassroots stations such as DS106 Radio.

Digital Storytelling (also affectionately known as ds106) is an open, online course that happens at various times throughout the year at the University of Mary Washington… but you can join in whenever you like and leave whenever you need.

DS106 began at the University of Mary Washington in Spring of 2010 when Jim Groom re-imagined the way the Computer Science Course in Digital Storytelling, CPSC 106, might be taught. Since Jim Groom blogged about ds106 as an open and online experiment on December 7, 2010, this site has aggregated and archived 92308 blog posts created by its participants.

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PSA: Reclaim Hosting is provisionally compliant with the TX-RAMP standard until 11/13/2025 while pursuing full compliance. The TX-RAMP standard, which is based off of State-RAMP, Fed-RAMP, and NIST 800-53 rev 5 is a standardized approach for security assessment, certification, and continuous monitoring of cloud computing services for state organizations within Texas.

As a by-product of our provisional compliance and current audit for full compliance, Reclaim Hosting has become compliant (excluding controls that do not apply to Reclaim) with all level 1 control families within NIST 800-53 rev 5, pending third-party assessment. This is part of a on-going project to secure our servers and make sure our clients data is protected. Some highlights from this project are below:

Updates to separation of duties, defense in depth, and access control company-wide
Revamp of the risk management process to support the guidelines listed within NIST 800-53 rev 5
Establishment of baseline configurations that can be used for annual third-party penetration testing going forward
Change management and configuration management updates to support better documentation and task-tracking company-wide
Revamp of the incident response process for closer alignment with the NIST Incident Response Framework
Updates to active monitoring, vulnerability scanning, log collection, log storage, and file integrity monitoring using a customized open-source SIEM solution
Updates to server orchestration and automation workflows

These are a few of the larger highlights that came out of the compliance process, but there are many, many more that were not mentioned here. I am very excited with the progress Reclaim has made over the last year in our cybersecurity department, and even more excited with where we are headed in the future!

If you are a Domain of One's Own or Managed Hosting client and would like more detailed information about our ongoing compliance process and system security plan, please reach out to us at support@reclaimhosting.com.

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It is with great excitement that we can announce that Justin Webb has joined Reclaim Hosting as a managing partner. Justin has been involved with Reclaim Hosting before it was even Reclaim Hosting, as he was the Chief Information Officer at the University of Mary Washington to green light the Domain of One’s Own pilot in 2012. Since that time he has run X1 Consulting, his own consultancy that serves a wide array of IT organizations and where Reclaim Hosting has been a very happy client. After taking Justin’s sound advice for more than seven years, we jumped at the opportunity for a tighter partnership that would allow us to bring on a leader who already knows our team, intimately understands our business, and has a broader view of the IT landscape.

Justin Webb joins Reclaim Hosting as managing partnerJustin’s expertise will prove invaluable in helping us to continue to grow Reclaim sustainably, while at the same time freeing up some of the team’s time to worry about things other than finance and policy. Moreover, Justin’s focus on policy and security allows us to further buttress our company-wide push to become not only the company known for support, but also security! I hope you all will provide a warm welcome to Justin as he joins our team, and let him know the relief could not have come soon enough :)

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Preserving websites and web content for the long haul is important to our team! CMS's get updated, plugins go out of date, and PHP versions change, which means that your dynamic sites often need tending to over time. An essential aspect of preservation is thinking about how to flatten, or archive dynamic sites that are no longer going to be updated, to make sure they continue to be accessible!

There are several tools out there that can flatten sites to HTML files that are worth checking out, like SiteSucker on macOS, and HTTrack on Windows and Linux. It is also worth checking out the family Webrecorder tools, including ArchiveWeb.page and ReplayWeb.page. All these tools are fantastic, but each has their strengths and weaknesses. Flattening tools like SiteSucker and HTTrack don't work with every type of site, and Webrecorder's tools work with almost any site, but can be difficult to learn how to archive an entire site and all its pages. This is why we made the Site Archiving Toolkit!

The Site Archiving Toolkit allows you to quickly and easily make both flattened HTML and web archive versions of websites. It provides a relatively easy to use command line interface for crawling sites using both HTTrack and Browsertrix Crawler (from the Webrecorder project). These archives can be stored on Reclaim Cloud and linked to, but are also zipped and easy to download, where they can be placed on any web server for others to view!

Using the Site Archiving ToolkitYou can try out the Site Archiving Toolkit on Reclaim Cloud by installing it from the Marketplace.

Once it's installed, use the Web SSH button to open the terminal:

Finally, use the archive command to start crawling a site! Type archive and give it a URL (starting with http:// or https://) to crawl. You can even give it multiple URLs at once, separated by spaces.

While the crawl runs, you can watch its progress, or close the terminal. You do not need to keep the tab open in your browser for the toolkit to keep running.

You can visit the environment's URL to see all in progress crawls, check logs, view past crawls, and download them!

The page will show all past crawls sorted by time. Any currently running crawls will be marked "INCOMPLETE".

Clicking on a particular crawl allows you to view both the httrack and webrecorder versions of the site, by clicking on those respective links. You can also see the logs for each by clicking on the .log files, or download each archive to your computer by clicking on either of the .zip files.

Finally, you can use the Config button, then click on crawls in the left sidebar to rename each crawl or delete crawls you no longer need.

We've got further information on the Site Archiving Toolkit itself, and how to use some of its more advanced features on GitHub:

TaylorJadin/site-archiving-toolkit – GitHub

We also did a Reclaim TV stream on the Toolkit shortly after it was released:

Archiving and Flattening ProjectsWe are happy to work with you if you have a flattening or archival project that you need help with, large or small. Last year, we helped archival and preservation of the UMW Blogs platform, as UMW started its new multisite Sites@UMW. You can check out the UMW Blogs archive by visiting its original domain, umwblogs.org!

You can also check out the Reclaim TV stream that we did about the archival work:

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Hello and welcome to your quick mid-month summary of all things important and upcoming across our community:

Announcements and blog postsRallyX & US10 Post-MortemOur infrastructure lead Chris Blankenship provides a detailed post-mortem on recent issues with one of the host servers for Reclaim Cloud that significantly impacted one of our Shared Hosting servers and resulted in some downtime.

The "Newsletters with Ghost" Flex Course is Complete!Read Pilot Irwin's celebratory post concluding our recent flex course on Newsletters with Ghost. Thank you to everyone who's taking part, started new newsletters on their own domain and reclaimed part of their digital identity along the way.

From passion project to web empire.. talking ReclaimPress with Bryan MathersSince the launch of the beta program for ReclaimPress many in our community have enjoyed seeing not only a new hosting offer for WordPress but also the unique visuals that accompany our newest offering. Created by our long-time collaborator and friend Bryan Mathers, of Visual Thinkery, we have been working hard to bring you a visual concept that truly captures what makes this new venture so special… and why you should get involved!

Open Call for Case StudiesThis academic year we've worked with institutions to develop institutional capability and infrastructure. What we’ve learned is that when it comes to digital education, things move fast and keeping up with the newest tools and technologies is an ongoing challenge. Our case studies offer quick insights into practice and products, helping you make the most of open tools and infrastructure. With practical examples and take aways to help you navigate your own projects, these case studies offer a way to share practice, celebrate impact and contribute to the community.

Share YOUR story in the new academic year!Work with us to share best practice and lessons learnt, and tell YOUR story of how you use open edtech tools or infrastructure with staff and students. This is an opportunity to reflect and share your work beyond your institution with a little help from our expert team.

So, do you have a story to tell or a project that you think would be a good fit for a Reclaim Case Study? Get in touch and let us know!

Don't miss today's May Community Chat – Commons in a Box OpenLabWe’re big fans of the Commons in a Box OpenLab, so for May’s Community Chat we want to highlight the amazing work that’s driving the City Tech OpenLab, and the ways that OpenLab can create an open platform for collaborative teaching and learning. If you're curious about OpenLab, join us on May 15th at 12pm ET to learn more! Details, including how to register, are on the events calendar.

Reclaim TV GuideThis month tune live on Fridays:

Friday May 17 @ 10amET - Let's Talk ReclaimPress! with Bryan Mathers
Friday May 24 @ 10am ET - Protoweb
Friday May 31 @ 10am ET - Own your slides with reveal.js

Catch up on Reclaim TV on demand:

Wrapping up our Newsletters with Ghost Flex Course
Open LLMs on Reclaim Cloud

You can see the updated schedule at any time by checking out events.reclaimhosting.com!

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As some of you may be aware, we recently had issues with one of the host servers for Reclaim Cloud that significantly impacted one of our Shared Hosting servers (rallyx.reclaimhosting.com) and resulted in some downtime.

TL;DR: MySQL crashed and we had to restore backups to bring the server and the sites it hosts back online. This did result in a few hours of lost content (between ~11am on 27 April and early morning 28 April), which we sincerely apologize for.

We are working with our hosting partner to optimize backups to ensure quicker resolution should something like this happen again, and will work to distribute load across all of Reclaim Cloud's host servers so that downtime on one host impacts as few users as possible.

Below is a more in-depth breakdown of the cause of the incident and resolution if you need more information. And please, if you do have an issue, don't hesitate to reach out.

27 April 2024

On Saturday, 27 April 2024, around 9pm EDT (0100 UTC on 28 April 2024), we saw brief downtime on one of Reclaim Cloud’s hardware nodes (hn10.us.reclaim.cloud). This resolved itself, and its initial investigation suggested the cause of the crash to be due to heavy I/O during backup processes.

28 April 2024

The previous crash of the aforementioned hardware node resulted in the corruption of MySQL data on one of the virtual servers it hosted; rallyx.reclaimhosting.com. This was not immediately clear though, and downtime initially appeared to be caused by a stuck process related to the heavy I/O. However, once the container was successfully restarted the MySQL corruption was discovered.

On Sunday, 28 April 2024, around 10am EDT (1400 UTC) work began to repair the MySQL corruption and restore the server and the sites hosted on it to working order. All attempts failed, and around 2pm EDT (1800 UTC) we decided to restore service from a backup.

The server itself was rolled back to a backup taken on 21 April 2024, and this process completed around 5:40pm EDT (2140 UTC). User accounts were then restored from a backup taken on 27 April 2024; prior to the previously mentioned crash of the hardware node that resulted in downtime. This restoration completed around 11:30pm EDT (0330 UTC on 29 April 2024). Given that these backups were a day old, some data loss is expected.

29 April 2024

On Monday, 29 April 2024, around 9:30am EDT (1330 UTC), the same hardware node crashed again. Given backups were not running, the cause was not immediately clear. We reached out to our hardware vendor, OVH, for them to investigate.

Around 11am EDT (1500 UTC) OVH determined that the cause was a faulty power supply on the server and replaced it. However, there were subsequent issues associated with a reboot after the power supply was replaced. We continued to work with OVH to determine a solution.

By 12:30pm EDT (1630 UTC), we were able to reboot the server to stabilize the connection. The server remains online at this point.

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This academic year we've worked with institutions to develop institutional capability and infrastructure. What we’ve learned is that when it comes to digital education, things move fast and keeping up with the newest tools and technologies is an ongoing challenge.

So far this year, we have published:

ReclaimEDU: A Reclaim Case StudyFor our second Reclaim Case Study production, we wanted to pull from the knowledge and experience of our team to give you a deeper look at Reclaim's latest and greatest… ReclaimEDU! You've heard about what ReclaimEDU is— our new multiregion cloud hosting service for .edu sites— but we thought you should also know how we got here. Read the case study.

So, do you have a story to tell or a project that you think would be a good fit for a Reclaim Case Study? Get in touch and let us know!

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Since the launch of the beta program for ReclaimPress many in our community have enjoyed seeing not only a new hosting offer for Wordpress but also the unique visuals that accompany our newest offering.

Created by our long-time collaborator and friend Bryan Mathers, of Visual Thinkery, we have been working hard to bring you a visual concept that truly captures what makes this new venture so special... and why you should get involved!

Join us live on May 17 at 10am ET / 3pm GMTJoin us as we sit down with special guest Bryan Mathers to talk about how the artwork was created and his own experiences with ReclaimPress. Watch the stream over at Reclaim TV, or catch the recording later on archive.reclaim.tv or our YouTube channel!

What is ReclaimPress?ReclaimPress is a cloud platform that is specifically tailored to hosting WordPress sites. It provides your site with dedicated, fast, and scalable hosting at an unbeatable price, all the while living in an easy-to-use dashboard.

We're taking the power and flexibility of Reclaim Cloud and adding a simple-to-use, WordPress-optimized management interface. We think this combo will be a compelling one, a real chocolate and peanut butter situation, but we need your help and feedback!

How can I join the beta program?The hosting experience is simple, fast, and rock-solid, and we are already using it for many projects, including our own high-traffic public-facing sites (like reclaimhosting.com). So we are offering you the chance to join the beta program for Reclaim Press whilst we are still working through some bugs related to the ReclaimPress Dashboard and user interface, which we will keep documented on the signup page.

If you give it a spin and have feedback, make sure to reach out!

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As of this week, we've officially wrapped up our most recent flex course, Newsletters with Ghost. If you were waiting until it was complete to check it out, now's a great time.

This is a free, beginner-friendly course designed to help users get started with the open-source newsletter/blogging platform Ghost. We'd recommend it for anyone who's:

looking to move away from proprietary platforms like Substack (Ghost is free and open-source, so you can run it yourself and take it with you anywhere you want!)
interested in a more streamlined experience than WordPress (Ghost has dedicated itself to the newsletter/blogging format, so it can focus on developing specific features really well instead of trying to be all things to all people!)
starting their first newsletter or blog (Ghost's simple interface and robust documentation makes it easy to pick up, and our flex course can help you get oriented!)

The course consists of three video sessions, each one between 45 minutes and an hour. Each session comes with a blog post that puts the video alongside relevant resources and links, so you can follow along or refer back later, and all the blog posts are collected on the Reclaim EdTech website.

Session one covers the why, introducing you to Ghost and the philosophies behind it behind it, and comparing/contrasting it to alternative platforms to help you get a feel for why you might want to use it.
Session two covers the how, walking you through the process of setting up a Ghost instance on Reclaim Cloud and connecting Mailgun in order to make sure your posts get sent out correctly.
Session three covers the what, giving you a tour of the Ghost interface and all its features so that you can add staff members and subscribers, customize the site look, create new posts, and more.

The course may be over, but the fun's not done. Give Ghost a try, follow along with each session, and come chat with us in our Discord if you have any questions or want to share your experience!

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Digital capability is key in Higher Education. If you’re looking to develop a new vision or champion the power of open-source tools and platforms within your institution, we can help.

Over the past ten years we’ve become known for world-class hosting for Higher Ed and championing open software and platforms for instructional design.

Our team has decades of experience in instructional technology, and we know what works (and also what doesn’t and why). We’ve worked with hundreds of institutions in the US, Canada and Europe, talking the talk and walking the walk of supporting staff and students on campus and in the cloud.

We offer dedicated training for your administrators, instructional designers and academic staff via virtual training sessions supported by documentation and resources;
We curate a year-round program flex courses, community chats, technology showcase sessions, expert voices and events;
We provide peer-support and networking via our community hub on Discord, which is free to join and open to all customers.

Keen to learn more? Explore what we do and get involved.

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We recently had the opportunity to lead a pre-conference workshop for the SUNY Digital Learning Conference. It was a great opportunity to discuss the work we've been doing around here to build our social presence and communication platforms on top of open-source tools. We were especially interested in leading discussion around the risks of relying on proprietary platforms, while also encouraging folks to critically examine what could the most beneficial changes they could make. More than once, this very blog and newsletter came up because, of course, everything comes back to the blog!

We started with some introduction and stage setting, then talked about what tools and platforms we were using a few years ago. We then did some Visitors & Residents mapping to visualize it and asked participants to do their own mapping. After some more discussion, we talked about the new tools we and led a pre-mortem on what to consider when adopting a new communication tool or participating in a new social media space! Thanks to the Open Co-op for the pre-mortem idea and inspiration there!

Here are our slides and abstract from the workshop!

Abstract:

Given the fall from grace we’ve seen various social media platforms experience recently— from Twitter’s transition to X, to Substack’s implosion— now is the time to think critically about how to be informed, and autonomous, digital citizens. We’re seeing more and more social media users finding themselves immersed in platforms they’ve spent many hours cultivating community and content on, only to feel the rug pulled out from under them when that platform does or supports something that doesn’t align with those users’ values. At Reclaim Hosting, we’ve always been more comfortable working in spaces that are as open as possible so that we have as much control over our content and communications as possible. Our socials, however, were always stuck with the big-box providers. With the rise of the fediverse, we’re taking our autonomy back. Join us as we discuss the Reclaim Hosting team’s transition to Mastodon, a self-hostable, decentralized social networking platform, and Ghost, an open source blogging platform. We’ll discuss our perspectives on the current state of social media affairs, walk participants through our open setup, and demonstrate how to reclaim your socials!

Slides:

Reclaim Your SocialsReclaim Your Socials.pdf2 MBdownload-circle

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It's April and we have a spring in our step!

Welcome to the mid month update packed with resources, events and important updates. Get a cup of coffee and enjoy!

📣 AnnouncementsOur team is growing - we're hiring!Our team is growing... and we are looking to for a new Customer Support Specialist to join our team. Interested in working with Reclaim? Go to apply online via Indeed today.

Update: AutoSSL & Let's EncryptLearn more about how cPanel has changed their provider for SSL certificates issued through AutoSSL in this post from Pilot. Previously they used Sectigo for automatically-issued certs, with Let's Encrypt available as an alternative for users through a cPanel plugin. Let's Encrypt has now replaced Sectigo, and will be the default provider for AutoSSL going forward.

Security Update: Remote MySQLDue to our new cybersecurity compliance requirements, we have blocked remote MySQL access across our infrastructure. If you are working with Domain of One's Own or Managed Hosting - check out this post by Noah which provides a summary.

Don't miss out: ReclaimPress in Beta is now availableReclaimPress is a cloud platform that is specifically tailored to hosting WordPress sites. It provides your site with dedicated, fast, and scalable hosting at an unbeatable price, all the while living in an easy-to-use dashboard.

🗓️ Mark your calendarsApril ReclaimTVReclaim TV: Arc BrowserApril 19 @ 10am EDT

Taylor & Amanda chat about The Browser Company's browser, Arc Browser in this stream.

Reclaim TV: YunoHost on Reclaim Cloud April 26 @ 10am EDT

Taylor will be chatting through the suite of tools to make hosting web apps easier that runs on top of Debian Linux and happens to work well on Reclaim Cloud, YunoHost.

Watch the streams over at Reclaim TV, or catch the recording later on archive.reclaim.tv or our Youtube channel!

Not too late to join our Flex Course: Newsletters with Ghost!It's not too late to join our free flex course focused on the open-source newsletter platform, Ghost. So if you are looking for a new home for your newsletter, and move your newsletter to your own domain, this course is for you!

Session 1: What is Ghost?

Session 2: Ghost and Mailgun Setup

Session 3: Using Ghost & Writing Your Newsletter

Our flex courses are free, beginner-friendly professional development courses you can follow at your own pace or by joining into the live activities each week. Sign up today: Flex Course: Newsletters with Ghost!

The outlook for the rest of the month is looking bright... #4life.

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Our team is growing... and we are looking to for a new Customer Support Specialist to join our team.

As a Customer Support Specialist, you will be at the forefront of ensuring our customers' technical needs are met promptly and effectively. You'll play a vital role in maintaining high levels of customer satisfaction through exceptional support, efficient issue resolution, and continuous improvement of our services in a highly collaborative environment. Our ideal candidate exhibits a working style characterized by adaptability, collaboration, and a strong commitment to achieving both individual and team goals.

Position OverviewTitle: Customer Support Specialist
Job Type: Full-time (40 hours/week)
Shift: TBD based on candidate, may include nights and weekends
Salary: $60k to 70k
Work Location: Fully Remote; must reside in the United States.

Interested in working with Reclaim? Go to apply online via Indeed today.

Our Mission & ValuesWe want to empower students and educators to take control of their digital identity.

Reclaim Hosting provides educators and institutions with an easy way to offer their students domains and web hosting that they own and control. We encourage users to have an authentic and personal relationship with the technology they use. Our core values guide our strategies and individual actions so that we create a company whose character is as radical as our product.

At Reclaim Hosting we agree to a set of core values that help guide how we work, play, and problem solve together. If these resonate with you, there just might be an open position with your name on it.

Interested in working with Reclaim? Go to apply online via Indeed today.

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As part of a recent update, cPanel has changed their provider for SSL certificates issued through AutoSSL. Previously they used Sectigo for automatically-issued certs, with Let's Encrypt available as an alternative for users through a cPanel plugin. Let's Encrypt has now replaced Sectigo, and will be the default provider for AutoSSL going forward.

If you're a Domain of One's Own or cPanel Managed Hosting admin, it's possible that you'll see rate limit errors.

Let's Encrypt has rate limits on how many certs it can issue at once, so if your server has a large number of domains/subdomains associated with it (including if end users have made lots of subdomains), AutoSSL may run into that limit while trying to issue new certs. This is happening because, due to the provider change, AutoSSL is trying to issue new certs for every domain on the server all at once.

Unfortunately, because cPanel sets the SSL provider and LE sets the rate limits, the situation is currently out of Reclaim's hands. However, in order to try and decrease the impact, cPanel has set up cron jobs in order to run Let's Encrypt on smaller batches of domains a couple of times a day.

This lets servers space things out and avoid hitting the rate limit, and prevents the problem from recurring in the future. Because AutoSSL will automatically renew certificates in the order they were issued/order they expire, expirations & renewals will also be staggered as a result.

There aren't any steps you need to take directly for the time being, but until LE can issue certificates to all domains on a site, you may see sites without a SSL cert.

End users also don't need to do anything at this time. That said, Reclaim will be removing the Let's Encrypt cPanel plugin in order to prevent confusion among end users, since it no longer serves as an alternative to the AutoSSL Sectigo certificates and any users that try to issue certs through it will contribute to the rate limiting problem.

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Announcement: Reclaim Hosting is disabling Remote MySQL Access.

Due to our new cybersecurity compliance requirements, we have blocked remote MySQL access across our infrastructure. If you are working with Domain of One's Own or Managed Hosting, this block can be bypassed with administrator approval, however, we do want you to know the risks involved:

MySQL has had many exploits in the past, both in applying permissions and in preventing access to the host server. It is reasonable to expect more in future; since very few admins allow untrusted access to a MySQL server, it is not strongly locked down against external attacks by default.
If remote access to MySQL is allowed, it makes databases more susceptible to brute force attacks and other forms of access-gaining attacks, as the port would easily be able to be scanned.
Allowing untrusted users who are not experienced in database administration or current security practices remote access exposes the database and by extension the entire server to all types of attacks, as MySQL can be used as point of entry by remote hijackers through an app that does not use current security standards.
An open remote MySQL port can be used for DDOS attacks against the server.

We recommend that users access their database through cPanel's PHPMyAdmin functions or the cPanel terminal. If the user is developing an application, we recommend using a service like Reclaim Cloud where the user has a containerized instance and is not endangering the production server in its entirety. However, we understand that some Domain of One's Own and Managed Hosting clients require this access for their specific use-cases. With DoOO or Managed Hosting Admin approval, we can unblock this port and allow users to use Remote MySQL once again.

If you have any concerns, please reach out to us at support@reclaimhosting.com, we are more than happy to answer any questions regarding this change.

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Team Reclaim was proud to take part in the OER24 Conference in Cork, Ireland this year. We had so much fun over the packed two days at Munster Technological University (MTU), chaired by Co-Chairs, Dr Gearóid Ó Súilleabháin and Dr Tom Farrelly.

There is a lot of conference goodness being shared openly by the conference organizers and participants, and we definitely recommend you explore:

Keynote Day 1: Betwixt fairy tales and dystopian futures by Dr Rajiv Jhangiani
Keynote Day 2: by Dr Catherine Cronin and Professor Laura Czerniewicz
Day 1 GASTA Sessions with Co-Chair Dr Tom Farrelly
Day 2 GASTA Sessions with Co-Chair Dr Tom Farrelly
OER24 blog guest posts
History of the OER24 artwork with Bryan Mathers

as well as a host of slides, resources and images posted with the hashtag #OER24.

Missed Reclaim's session? Never fear, we made a special recording of our talk for Reclaim TV, with Jim, Meredith and Maren talking about Reclaiming #Edtech4life in Open Education. Enjoy!

OER24 offered a great opportunity for us to catch up with folk in our community both in person and online, and we want to say a big thank you and send big kudos to the Conference Co-Chairs and host organisation, the team at Association for Learning Technology and everyone involved in making this awesome event happen. We're hoping to be back for OER25!

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My 5th OER conference is in the books! I’m just getting back to my desk after taking the weekend to reflect and think through the experience of OER24 this year and I’m so grateful for the entire trip. From coffee shops, trips to see the Titanic’s final port of call, seeing family, catching up with colleagues, and most of all experiencing all the goodness that OER brings to the EdTech world each year.

Preparing for the ConferenceSurprisingly enough I found out I was heading to Cork back in November. In fact it was the day after my wedding! I remember chuckling to my husband over brunch that a conference proposal was submitted while we were dancing the night away.

Jim, Maren, and I planned to create a presentation about our EdTech offerings, and professional development, and talk through some of our new product offerings! We ultimately decided to record a full version of the presentation as we all wouldn’t be able to make it in person. This honestly turned out great! There wasn’t an option to watch any of the individual presentations virtually so we were able to share this along with the slides as a way to incorporate a virtual option.

Pre-conference FestivitiesAfter meeting my parents in Dublin (they just so happened to be in Europe at the same time attending a travel agency conference!) we were off to explore the city! It was a short and sweet visit as we were off to see family the next day, but it was the perfect chance to fight some jetlag. We walked the river into the Temple Bar area and explored the streets. And of course, a pint of Guinness was for lunch.

Next, we went to see some family in Clara (in County Offaly). My dad’s mother’s family immigrated to the US and it is always so special to see where they came from. The last time I saw them was in 2016 so I don’t entirely remember so much about the trip and the visit with them in general.

After the stop in Clara, we were off to Cork! We spent the next 2 days walking through the city center and exploring Cobh (pronounced Cove), indulging in some coffee, whiskey, shopping, and even some nautical history! Cobh (or Queenstown for the Brits) was the final port of call for the Titanic on April 11, 1912, before meeting its inevitable iceberg on April 15, 1912. We took in the sights at the riverfront in Cork and the striking cathedral in Cobh that overlooks the beautiful waterside and colorful houses. Then I found a Whiskey tasting at a local bar, where the host holds the Guinness World Record for making the most Irish Coffees in three minutes. We definitely decided to bring some Whiskey back with us!

As folks were arriving for the conference, I spent the day before catching up with Maren and Anne-Marie over sushi and artwork!

OER24 EventsDay 1Day 1 was off to a great success. Dr Rajiv Jhangiani‘s keynote was fantastic, creating a base for the themes surrounding OER at a crossroads.

Then, Maren and I were up next! We started things off in the very first session of the individual presentations on the Innovative Pedagogies And Creative Education track. And we had a blast! It was my first presentation with Maren and I think we make a good team

I was glad to have the presentation finished as that meant we could really focus on the other presentations happening with the other attendees. I caught up on podcasting with Maren and Martin, creating conversation starters and stepping away from the screen through audio formats. There’s A school creating a practical MOOC through a cooking class, too! It’s taught in a virtual format using Atem Minis and H5P for production.

With Gasta sessions ending the day I left the first day inspired and excited to see what was next. Tom Farrelly facilitates 5-minute presentations in such a charismatic manner that you can’t help but stay engaged.

Day 2Day 2 arrived too quickly! We started the day with an amazingly thought-provoking keynote with Dr Catherine Cronin and Professor Laura Czerniewicz. They spoke on their recent book Higher Education For Good: Teaching and Learning Futures which sparked a lot of awareness around key issues we’re facing in our community as a whole over the last few years from 2015 to now. Their slide picture below brings up a lot of ideas and things I’ve been thinking about over the last few months too.

Then Martin Weller spoke on his 30 years of Ed Tech experience and where he’s heading as he’s preparing for retirement. I had the pleasure of spending some time with him over the conference and I’ve been inspired by his work over my short career as well. “Blogging is the way…”

Lunch rolled around and Maren and I found ourselves having our own hallway chat in the form of a stream! Jim was able to join us virtually for just a bit along with many members attending the conference to share some of the ideas that stuck out to us the most over the conference itself. We got talking and realized we’d completely missed lunch! The stream really captures our thoughts in the moment and it’s worth a watch (my blog post doesn’t cover it enough).

We ended up finding a quiet place in the main arena space to keep chatting. We sat with Alan Levine talking through radio streaming and Bryan Mathers about upside-down presentation formats.

And we wrapped up the conference with the Day 2 Gasta sessions once again and celebrated the accomplishments of Martin.

ReflectionsIf you’ve taken the time to read this far, I’ve got some reflections! OER24 was by far one of the most inspiring conferences where I’ve been a delegate, to date. I am always inspired by the community projects, classes, and research everyone is working through, some mentioned in the conference program above.

I was facing a bit of burnout throughout the winter, feeling knee-deep in my to-do list really focusing on what needed to happen to keep going, and haven’t had a chance to really step back to set new goals and projects for my professional career.

While I’m feeling a little bit of burnout, I’m also feeling rooted in my position at Reclaim. I’ve been with the company for 7 years, on to my 8th year and I’ve seen how much the company’s grown and changed over the years. We’ve really focused on building the capacity as a team to scale to new growth through ReclaimPress and ReclaimEDU with Cloud Infrastructure. We’ve grown from a 4-person team to 11 people and we’re not slowing down! We even built a Slack back channel to share our experiences on the ground for OER24 to allow the team to follow along. It also served as a great way to take notes throughout the conference.

OER24 was just what I needed to remember why I work at Reclaim. To help members of the Open Education community create their projects in an open format, in an affordable way, all while teaching to build capacity. To encourage folks to share their stories and even find ways to bring that into Reclaim. I have a list of folks to follow up with to bring into our live streams, or even Reclaim Case Studies.

So I’m back in the US, with a lot of gratitude, inspiration, and excitement to see where we go in 2024! Gasta!

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For our second Reclaim Case Study production, we wanted to pull from the knowledge and experience of our team to give you a deeper look at Reclaim's latest and greatest... ReclaimEDU!

You've heard about what ReclaimEDU is— our new multiregion cloud hosting service for .edu sites— but we thought you should also know how we got here.

It all began back around November 2021, during a Reclaim team trip in Nashville, Tennessee, where the team, somewhat smaller than it is today, sat down in a brainstorming huddle and agreed that multiregion web hosting was to be the next big aspiration for the company. Jim and Tim had been tossing ideas back and forth and exploring the idea for a little while up to then, and took advantage of one of the rare opportunities the team had to be in the same room to float the idea over to our System Administrator, Chris. They and the rest of the team could see how this could be big: the glittering promise of near 100% uptime with multiple, simultaneously synchronizing instances of a high-trafficked site beckoned our attention and efforts.

It wasn't until almost a full year later in the late summer/early fall of 2022 that the team had capacity to start actually building with multiregion; but when they did, things took off at top speed. The timing was right, and everything was falling into place. We had Reclaim Cloud up and running with serious success by then, and were getting our sea legs with Cloudflare, so we were well positioned to test out a DEV instance of our reclaimhosting.com site with multiregion using this setup. The site was running in perfect sync on two separate servers so that if one went down, the other could continue serving the site with no interruption.

And... it worked!

It wasn't long before we began running reclaimhosting.com's PROD instance, and got a third server up and running, dedicated to maintaining a static copy of the site so that, if the other two servers both fail at the same time, there's still something that can be served.

We realized the potential this setup had for much bigger operations than our somewhat tame home site. It was clear from the get-go that higher education institutions running their .edu sites on WordPress could greatly benefit from this kind of speed and uptime. Never ones to drag our feet, we shared our enthusiasm for this potential and our own success in getting it to work reliably with institutions like Macalester and Trinity College, who trusted us to get them set up as well.

The buzz in our Slack when the first university got up and running with multiregion was an unforgettable giddiness: "Guys, it's up, and it's fast!"

So, to say the least, we're completely ecstatic to finally have this available as a formal service for the wider community, and can't wait to see the difference it makes for our users and their mission-critical sites.

Key takeaways: * Uptime, Uptime, Uptime! + Multiregion means failover: since your site is running on more than a single server, if one server goes down, the other can pick it right back up! + When all else fails, visitors can still get a static version of your site. No more HTTP Error 500 pages! * The speeeed! + Persistent caching keeps things quick. + Traffic is always pushed to the most responsive/performant server at any given time. * Security is our middle name + DDoS Protection prevents attacks taking the server offline + WAF blocks malicious traffic from ever reaching server(s)

Further reading...... on ReclaimEDU

ReclaimEDU homepage!
ReclaimEDU: the Infomercial by Jim Groom
Announcing ReclaimEDU: Your Campus in the Cloud by Pilot Irwin

... on the multiregion journey

Doing Multiregion WordPress Stuff With Cloudflare And Reclaim Cloud by Chris Blankenship
WPMR tag on Bavatuesdays

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The great Maren Deepwell (who Reclaim Hosting has been lucky enough to work with after her long stint as ALTs brilliant CEO) has created a visual anthology celebrating 10 years of Reclaim’s art. It’s a very cool video, and I highly recommend you partake in the celebration

I’m really proud of the brand we’ve been able to forge over the last decade. Trying to make a relatively boring product like web hosting compelling has been one of the funnest elements of the job. What’s more, getting to partner with the entire Reclaim team and the likes of Bryan Mathers to do it has been the real gold.

Gold Record plan for the newly launched Reclaim.Press

Bryan will quickly deflect any praise or compliment right back at you taking little to no credit for how much his own visual storytelling shapes our identity by capturing a raucous sense of cultural play without sacrificing a deep, company-wide commitment to an open and independent web.

Bryan Mathers early vision for the indie edtech record store with snide proprietor and all

There’s a fine line to walk between tongue and cheek references and an underlying commitment to what can be referred to as indie edtech or trailing edge technology. A belief that the new and shiny can often obfuscate the long history of edtech, but also erase any sense of its embedded cultural history that impacts ours daily lives.

The iconic, industrial visual label of Reclaim Cloud

The link between edtech and vinyl or edtech and an independent record store is not only playful, but also an argument for the production of online culture and the value of an independent space to do it. Reclaim understands itself outside the homogenizing box-store mentality of massive social media sites and hosting services, much like independent record labels such as Dischord that are anathema to the mainstream business of music. It’s about community, it’s about focus, and it’s about controlled, responsible growth. These are so many of the understated, subliminal messages in the Mathers Aesthetic that are directly linked to an ethos of indie edtech.

The ds106 album cover where Giulia Forsythe remixes Raymond Pettibon that in many ways pre-figures Bryan Mathers remixing

I don’t think it would be an overstatement to say that Bryan, however inadvertently, has become the Raymond Pettibon of indie edtech, and his aesthetic permeates far beyond the confines of Reclaim Hosting’s “album covers.” If I was being selfish I would refer to all the great work he has created for us over the years as the “Reclaim aesthetic,” but if I were to be honest it’s more appropriate to say “that Mathers aesthetic!”—and we have just been lucky enough to be early to the party. Go ahead, try and create your online identity with an AI prompt, we’ll be over here working with the artists.

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We're thrilled to announce the beta launch of our latest product: ReclaimPress!

What does it cost?There are 4 monthly subscription plans available for sites hosted ReclaimPress:

Silver: $5/month for 1 GB of RAM
Gold: - $10/month for 2 GB of RAM
Platinum: $20/month for 4 GB of RAM
Diamond: $40/month for 8 GB of RAM

All plans include 20 GB of storage and a free staging site. All ReclaimPress accounts get 20 GB of backup storage and SSL certs for free.

Why is this a beta?We're taking the power and flexibility of Reclaim Cloud and adding a simple-to-use, WordPress-optimized management interface. We think this combo will be a compelling one, a real chocolate and peanut butter situation, but we need your help and feedback!

The hosting experience is simple, fast, and rock-solid, and we are already using it for many projects, including our own high-traffic public-facing sites (like reclaimhosting.com). That being said, we are still working through some bugs related to the ReclaimPress Dashboard and user interface, which we will keep documented on the signup page. If you give it a spin and have feedback, make sure to reach out!

Learn More and Try It Out!Check out our beta launch stream to learn more:

You get signed up to try it out by visiting https://reclaim.press!

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In August 2013 (Whois.com officially says August 28, 2013), 18-year-old Meredith sat in her first college class at Mary Washington. I was introduced to a thing called a domain name. She was asked to register a domain name as part of a class and was asked to write weekly reflections on the readings. And she created her first blog on meredithfierro.com.

Little did that version of Meredith know how much the blog would be used throughout those 10 years. From class assignments to professional development, that blog has stuck around. It’s become an archive of projects, milestones, fun, and reflection.

So fast forward to 2023, and I’m still looking through Where I’ve Been (can you tell Reclaim Open is still on the brain?). I wanted to take some time to document my blog/projects documents from UMW, at Reclaim, and what I’ve been up to personally (that’s more recent).

University BlogWhen I stepped into my freshman seminar, I did not really know what it would entail. Little did I know, I would start carving out her little home on the web. After using the domain name for most of my classes, I started thinking through how to use the domain name and found that WordPress was quickly becoming a solid tool in my toolkit. From subdomains for each class to categories on a single WordPress site, I realized how powerful a blog could be.

Then, I got my job as a student tutor at the Digital Knowledge Center, where WordPress, Omeka, Scalar, and Media projects, became the additional tools to work with. I began tutoring students and helping them gain the expertise to carve out their space on the web.

My website became a portfolio of sorts, where I could document my DKC projects and continue working on my class projects. I used it to work through my internship at Reclaim during my senior year at UMW, and my capstone course, to create a video about Domain of One’s Own for incoming students.

Reclaim BlogAfter I graduated and joined the Reclaim Hosting team, I was encouraged to continue blogging! I do wish I really stuck to that, I have a backlog of projects I want to blog. From longer-term projects to short and sweet articles on how to complete a specific task, the blog turned into a notebook.

Within the next 10 years, I do want this blog to turn into more of a blog to continue the notetaking, to document the Flex Courses, and Workshops, among other accomplishments at Reclaim. I do have a few in the docket to start with!

Travel BlogWhile this blog is a way to document my projects, it’s inadvertently becoming a place where I can document my travels as well! I used my domain name to blog about my semester abroad in London and my travels in Europe.

At Reclaim, the travels continued! I’ve been on team trips to New York City, Nashville, and San Diego– conference trips to Galway, Bristol, Atlanta and more recently New Orleans– and Reclaim specific (Domains and Reclaim Open) conferences to Oklahoma City, Durham, and while close to home, Fredericksburg. I’m so grateful for all the chances to travel!

Personal And this blog has stuck around with me throughout the last 10 years of my early adulthood. I moved to a new city for college, and stuck around after graduating. I’ve moved around a few times in Fredericksburg, not only my home, but my office space!

My side of the deskI even managed to find my person and my pup– so freaking excited to get married in a couple of months!

And through all of those changes the blog shaped an archive of my life, work, works in progress, among other things and I’m so grateful to be introduced to the world of the WWW back 10 years ago. It seems like so long ago, but it’s only just begun!

Featured Image Photo by Morgan Lane on Unsplash

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Hey everyone, I have an announcement that I need to share–

In the next few weeks, Jack and I are embarking on another military move. This time, we’re headed back up to the Washington DC/Northern VA area, and there’s a lot of change still to come on the horizon. With that in mind, I’ve decided that this is the right time for me to take a step back from Reclaim Hosting. My last official day as Director of Operations will be one week from today on Friday, September 8.

This has been an incredibly difficult decision, and I am very grateful to have spent the last eight years helping build something pretty special at Reclaim Hosting. Working for Reclaim’s mission, to bring affordable web hosting into the classroom while providing the proper support and resources to make it happen, has always felt like such a worthwhile way to spend my time. And I’m so proud that after so long, this mission is still at the core of how Reclaim runs today.

packing up Reclaim’s first t-shirts from my dining room tablescoping out Reclaim’s first conference venueI am indebted to Jim and Tim for seeing something in 2015 Lauren and providing such a supportive and encouraging space for her to step into her own. The person they hired is not the person I am today, and I owe that largely to the autonomy I’ve had at Reclaim Hosting to find my own voice. My ideas have always been heard and carefully considered. I have been challenged and held accountable. I have been trusted and taken seriously. I cannot express the level of impact that this had on me as a young woman getting started in a new career.

workshopping at Colgate Universityworkshopping at Skidmore CollegeThose early years at Reclaim were a real launchpad for me. In working closely with Jim, Tim, and many talented folks in the Reclaim community, I learned so much about how the web works, how to spin up servers, and how to troubleshoot advanced application-level issues. I overhauled the main Reclaim website and implemented softwares to help organize the work in front of us. And then I was able to take these new skills and begin sharing them with other beginner learners as well. I’m so grateful to have had the opportunity to teach, consult, brainstorm, and work alongside so many inspiring people in the higher ed community.

Taking meetings in the new HQMeredith and I chatting about email clients on a Reclaim Today episodeReclaim Video’s sponsor table at #OER18Building expertise in these areas helped me feel confident to take on larger operational responsibilities at Reclaim: to help oversee company-wide projects, run conferences and training events, and work to improve internal processes. Coming to work each day in Fredericksburg, VA with Meredith, Tim, and Jim’s floating iPad robot during the CoWork/Reclaim Video phase of Reclaim Hosting will forever be such a highlight for me. (It’s not a phase mom, it’s a lifestyle!!) Chris joined soon after and blew us all away pretty quickly, and the idea of true “teams” at Reclaim suddenly began to feel like a reality.

beating an escape room in Nashvilletaking on the San Diego zooMy later years at Reclaim were largely focused on helping the company grow intentionally while ensuring that the early mission and supportive team culture remained top priority. Being able to coach others at Reclaim and support their own progress has been a real honor. I want to give a massive thank you to Meredith, Chris, Gordon, Goutam, Pilot, Taylor, Amanda, and Noah for giving me the opportunity to work alongside you in these ways. You’ve pushed me to show up to work as the best version of myself, so thank you for that.

I also want to give a special thank you to my mentors over the last 8 years that have transformed the way I work through challenges, articulate plans, make decisions, and go after big goals. It has been an awesome ride, Reclaim Hosting, and I’ll be looking forward to all that the future holds.

If you want to stay in touch, I’ll still be here on this site, and I plan to continue hanging out on Discord and Mastodon as well. #4life!

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I’m pretty excited because one of the things I’ve been looking forward to for several months now, is testing and documenting ReclaimPress, which will be Reclaim Hosting’s latest product. In short, ReclaimPress offers performant, high-available WordPress hosting for when you … Continue reading →

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For Reclaim Hosting’s August Community Chat we had the good fortune of being joined by Bonnie Russell of Michigan State University’s MESH Research Lab to talk with us about the work she is part of to think more broadly about … Continue reading →

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At Reclaim Hosting we’ve been exploring plugins for offloading media from larger WordPress instances to object storage such as AWS’s S3 or Digital Ocean’s Spaces. There are a lot of good reasons to do this: First and foremost, we want … Continue reading →

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Perhaps it is fitting that I’m writing this on the 10th anniversary of Reclaim Hosting, but I wanted to take a quick minute to share some of the changes now live on Reclaim’s Domain of One’s Own (DoOO) product page. Earlier today I met with a few colleagues to celebrate …

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I have a longer post I want to write about Reclaim Hosting at what seems an inflection point for the company. I’ll use that to get a bit more indulgent about the where we’ve been, where we are, and where … Continue reading →

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In our most recent episode of Reclaim Today, Taylor Jadin and I talked with Paul Hibbitts about his work to create Docsify This. This tool is in many ways part of a longer trajectory of Hibbitts’s work, which I first … Continue reading →

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It’s official, as of today we now have an active European Union (EU) region in Reclaim Cloud, located in the partynacht central of Berlin, Germany. This has been a long-time coming and we’re thrilled to expand the geographical scope and … Continue reading →

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It’s been a long time coming, but I’m finally getting around to writing about Reclaim Open. Reading Tim’s post on his pinball streaming rig for Reclaim Arcade has inspired me to start with the streaming / recording setups we used for Reclaim Open and how that all came together! This post has become so long that I’m positive no one will read it, but hey it will be useful for me to look back on!

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Following up my last post, I realized that I wasn’t looking through the tags on Docker Hub properly, and the earliest version available as a pre-built container is actually WordPress 3.9! I had to take a closer look at the logs and make some guesses, as it turns out the environment variable for pointing WordPress to the right database host is different, and its hard to find info on using 8 year old docker images, but I got it working:

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For reasons, I needed to spin up a very old WordPress site using Docker today. I’m writing this blog post mostly just to jot down the compose file so I have it handy in the future. Digging through the oldest tags for the wordpress image on DockerHub it looked like 4.1 was the oldest version available, so I went with it. For the database, I went with the last version of MySQL version 5.

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I feel a bit behind the curve in writing about Reclaim Open, but I suppose it’s better late than never. We’re still technically in June, meaning the in-person event was just earlier this month, and we still have the online recap coming throughout the month of July, so perhaps my …

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This is the first time I have written about the AI craze that has swept the web over the past 6 months or so. I’ve been intentionally resisting the urge given so many of the hot takes, hysteria, and complaints … Continue reading →

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Creating a couple of videos highlighting Taylor’s 1-click Mastodon installer for Reclaim Cloud has been on my to-do for too long, so this week I knocked it out. I did two quick videos, one taking you through the basic install. … Continue reading →

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I’ve got a whole list of improvements I want to make to this site coming off of Reclaim Open. This blog is a static site made with hugo and of course hosted on Reclaim Hosting. If you are curious about how it works, I’ve done a stream and accompanying blog post about it: My Hugo setup and how this blog works ☐ Pull in posts from Mastodon This is a big one, and will take some design and javascript work.

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To be clear, it was Taylor Jadin who upgraded my PeerTube instance running at bava.tv from PostgreSQL 10 to PostgreSQL 13. I did watch and learn as he worked through the process, so I’m some the wiser, but I’m still … Continue reading →

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Here are some quick notes from helping Jim upgrade his bava.tv Peertube instance from PostgreSQL 10 to PostgreSQL 13. bava.tv uses Docker so actually changing Postgres versions is dead simple (basically just edit a number in the docker-compose.yml file and restart the containers) but we found out pretty quickly that you can’t just change the version of Postgres, and expect the database to still work. First I cloned the environment and added Adminer to the docker-compose.

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Whew– what a week of Reclaim Open! This was Reclaim Hosting’s 4th hosted conference and one of the best I’ve attended to date (and hopefully many more to come!). It was my first in-person conference since the pandemic and it absolutely did not disappoint! The week overall was incredible, full of laughter, catching up with […]

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I have a lot of half-finished blog posts that I want to finish up soon coming back from both Reclaim Open and a week-long family vacation, but hey I might as well finish up this old draft as I used this trick yet again today. I’ve got to get the blog momentum going after a few month’s hiatus! I work with docker and docker-compose very often for Reclaim Cloud stuff nowadays, and while I’m pretty comfortable with bind-mounts, docker volumes, and docker cp for getting files in and out of containers, doing serious things with databases still scares me a little.

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I’m sitting in Zurich airport preparing to return to the motherland for Reclaim Open after celebrating 20 years of marriage to my special lady friend. Lisbon was amazing, and life continues to be a gift with Antonella, I’m a very lucky man. It was our first time visiting Lisbon, and that city’s attractions are like something out of an amazing Dungeons and Dragons map, I really loved it.

But that is just one of the many anniversaries—albeit by far the most important—that are happening this year. I celebrated 10 years off the sauce, WordPress turned 20 years old last month, the world wide web went open 30 years ago in April, and next month Reclaim Hosting gets its double-digit wings by turning 10 years old in July—which is insane. Next week we kick off the celebration with our bi-annual conference re-framed as Reclaim Open, which will find many of the original DTLT crew back at the University of Mary Washington.

Reclaim Open at UMW from June 5-7, 2023

I’m really excited for this event, especially given this conference is going to be fairly small and focused. We’ll be lucky if we get 50 people all told. And all those attending represent a community of folks that still believe in the possibilities of the open web for education, and I count myself a proud member of this shrinking club. In fact, that was the take-away for me from OER23 in April, that re-connecting and re-committing to the work open ed techs do is crucial. It’s work I love, work I believe in, and work that has never been more important. We’re a motley crew strewn across the globe here and there, but for a few days Reclaim Open will bring together a handful of those mutants for a celebratory meeting to help us remember what it is we do and why—especially in the wake of the pandemic.

What’s more, while we’ve tried to keep it on the down-low given Reclaim hates to over-promise and under-deliver, the the official event (everything but the un-confernece) will be accessible remotely. We’re using our watch site setup discussed in my last post about karaoke to play with a hybrid conference delivery setup, and we plan on streaming all sessions and managing the online conversations through Reclaim Hosting’s Discord server. We can even stream out the Tuesday night karaoke from Reclaim Arcade! So in many ways the conference will be an exploration of how we can deliver an effective hybrid event, and it will be freely accessibly during the conference as well as throughout the month of July when we transition the sessions from the in-person conference to a fully online, month long 10-year anniversary celebration.

So yeah, I am definitely getting fired up for Reclaim Open, and given it is accessible from anywhere you should be too!

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I think it’s about time that I dust this blog off!

via GIPHY

It’s been almost a year since I last blogged about one of Reclaim’s first Flex Courses in Reclaim Ed Tech, and now we’ve completed the first year! Throughout that year we’ve put on several flex courses, workshops, and even planning for a Conference! (P.S. You should go register for all the awesome stuff planned!)

Towards the latter half of the year, I started participating in a lot of the Flex Courses and even the WordPress Multisite and Domain of One’s Own Workshops. We’ve got most of these in our Reclaim Hosting EdTech Discord so I would highly recommend checking it out! We’ve got a ton of goodness going on in that Discord that anyone from the Reclaim Hosting community can join in!

So to talk more about the Flex Courses, I joined in during the OBS sessions back in January starting with OBS, Open Broadcaster Software.

OBS is such great software if you’re looking to start streaming to Youtube or Twitch. I really enjoyed working with this software in an educational light, and it’s been vital to the Flex Course filming. I’ve only used it a handful of times until then and I’ve seen a bunch of people I follow use it for their gaming streams.

Next, was a Discord course! This was taking a dive into how you can set up a Discord server for your class, club or any large group in general. The session I worked through was with Pilot looking at setting up the server and using templates, and what you can do with your server– and throughout the month we looked at how Reclaim uses Discord to host virtual events.

This month; We’re wrapping up our Flex Course around Installatron applications. Most folks know you can install WordPress easily through Installatron, so we wanted to highlight some of the lesser-known applications like Omeka Classic and Omeka S as well as YOURLs, Matomo and Scalar. I was working on the Omkea Classic and Omeka S Sessions with Amanda and joined Taylor for the YOURLs session. These are some really awesome tools to use for any projects/classes/archives.

It’s been really fun to work on the Ed Tech team on the side. While I’m still incredibly involved with the Support Team, I’m loving the crossover we have between all the teams lately, keeping support at the core of Reclaim’s values. And it’s been so fun to work with my coworkers on some fun courses!

There are many more Flex Courses to come and I’m excited to see where year 2 of Ed Tech takes us! Check out the Youtube channel and discord when you get a chance too, to stay up to date on all things Ed Tech.

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One thing I’ve been thinking about recently is how schools can successfully run WordPress Multisite, Domain of One’s Own, and Reclaim Cloud Sandbox spaces together in a way that feels integrated and seamless. We’ve always led with the idea that these tools don’t compete with each other, and that actually the opposite is true: by running them in parallel to each other you can offer a little bit of something for everyone. Perhaps even in tiers or layers as described in my Nashville recap post from 2021. But how can we do that while still keeping the digital footprint for landing pages and end user sites as simple and intuitive as possible? I last explored this in my blog post called A New Model for Domains: DoOO & WPMS and shared how some schools like Coventry University and Oklahoma University are directing traffic and handling domain structures for landing pages and end user sites (which can feel like half the battle).

I love how some of our DoOO and WPMS schools are controlling growth on these platforms, as well as keeping things sustainable, by pushing all new signups to the WordPress Multisite by default. The WPMS then has a very limited set of plugins and themes that are easy to support and maintain for a large group of users. From there, if an end user wants to install a different theme, or explore a different application entirely, they’re directed to Domain of One’s Own. There’s more freedom here, but it likely involves a request form submission or a conversation with an admin before a cPanel account is granted. What’s ultimately happening now is that there are two paths for a user to take. And especially if we’re looking to add a third (Reclaim Cloud for next generation apps or sites that need more resources) it’s important for Reclaim to assist schools with correctly carving out these paths and creating very clear entry points.

This concept has come up in so many different conversations ranging from the visuals and metaphors we use to explain different topics, to how we’re articulating it in support scenarios, to how we’re providing more data for admins to make decisions, to how we’re pulling in these tools to help users choose the path that makes the most sense for them. We’ve been working on a few side projects to help with these scenarios, and now it feels like the right time to compile everything together.

When a new school comes to Reclaim to set up DoOO, WPMS, and the Cloud, I want them to have a cohesive menu of things that they can select or add to their setup to make it work to their preference. I’ve alluded to this with support articles like Domain of One’s Own Setup Features, which covers different signup workflows and cPanel customizations available for DoOO so a new admin can go through and decide what they’ll need. Even still, this article doesn’t quite capture everything that’s available in DoOO anymore, and it definitely doesn’t pull in WPMS & Reclaim Cloud. Where this “menu” lives or how it’s delivered is still a question mark (maybe as simple as adding in a few more guides) but for the purposes of this post I want to share a running list of some of the other projects we’ve been working on with the help of folks like Tom Woodward and Bryan Mathers to think more broadly about user choices, carving out paths, and connecting tools together.

Domain of One’s Own Visuals * publishing the refreshed page for reclaimhosting.com/domain-of-ones-own that better reflects the state of DoOO today * working with Bryan Mathers to get some new artwork that visually represents DoOO & stateu.org

the “before” version, which is overdue for a refreshThe Landing Page* building on Tom Woodward’s amazing Chooser Plugin / Landing Page that currently lives at landing.stateu.org; it also automatically pulls in the list of used plugins and themes on the site where it’s installed, which would be pretty neat for a new WPMS project as well.

you can see this demo live at landing.stateu.org! While the landing page can be designed however admins prefer and even framed as a choice between WPMS and DoOO, you could still opt to push new signups to a default starting point. In that case, the above “landing page” would actually live on the WPMS directly, integrate with SSO, and be able to reflect what plugins/themes are in use like the demo above. An example domain might be sites.school.edu for the homepage and sites.school.edu/user for end-user sites.

If users decide they want more flexibility in cPanel, they would click a menu link that takes them to a homepage for DoOO like domains.school.edu. This space has its own SSO integration and signup workflow, so users can create or request accounts depending on admin preference.

Community Showcase & Data Dashboard* Pulling in Taylor’s awesome work on the Domains Community Showcase site, as well as his Data Dashboard that pulls in last login info for DoOO users:

Demo Community Showcase site available at stateu.org/communityPulling in Last Login data right into the DoOO dashboard for admins^This dashboard was shared more thoroughly at the end of the last DoOO 201 workshop, and you can watch the final session called What’s Next for Domain of One’s Own for more info about how it works!

Support Resources* considering existing resources like the DoOO Admin landing page and end user support docs – our struggle with these has always been to keep them updated after they’re given to admins during setup.

The admin landing page has worked well as a home base for new schools because it’s simple and to the point. But how is this WP install managed or updated long term? Do admins still find this space useful 2-3 years in? What if the landing page “quick links” were instead pulled into the WP dashboard, similar to Taylor’s Data Dashboard work or similarly to what the Ultimate Dashboard plugin does?

End User support docs are currently available on stateu.org/docsSimilarly, I’d love to keep thinking about the future of end-user support docs. As mentioned above, this project gets complicated quickly because it becomes quite difficult for Reclaim to update each documentation site after they’ve been delivered to an institution. (Especially if the admin makes changes after the fact– we don’t want to overwrite those.) There’s a balance of ownership between what Reclaim can do to help and what admins choose to make available as a support resource, but I’m all for Reclaim providing starting templates where we can.

My latest thinking is that it may make sense for Reclaim to bring these templated guides into our main knowledge base under a new category of our Domain of One’s Own section. From there, new admins have two choices: they can point their users directly to those guides, which would have to be pretty generic to work for all/most setups, or admins could adopt articles for their own knowledge base sites. If and when Reclaim makes changes to one of our article templates, admins are notified by subscribing to the knowledge base section (already possible) and by hearing about it in our monthly newsletter.

Speaking of Notifications…I also think we’re not far off from really improving how we’re keeping different types of folks notified at Reclaim. In the early days we truly had 1 mailing list for the capital A “Administrator” of a project to get all notifications. Through the years we’ve been able to start separating out billing, support, SSO, and server maintenance notifications. We’ve also added the Roundup mailing list and Reclaim event notifications to the mix as well. It’s not a totally perfect system yet, but Pilot’s newest project setup questionnaire is a testament to how far we’ve come:

The Project Setup Questionnaire is now live at projectsetup.reclaimhosting.comPilot killed it with their work to improve how we’re collecting initial information from admins for new server/project setups. How we got by with a .PDF for so long, I’ll never know. :)

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Community Showcase & Data Dashboard* Pulling in Taylor’s awesome work on the Domains Community Showcase site, as well as his Data Dashboard that pulls in last login info for DoOO users:

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As we head into May 2023, Reclaim Hosting will celebrate the first anniversary of Reclaim EdTech. Over the last twelve months we ran five workshops and eight flex courses as part of this offering, with at least one event a month, contrasting with previous years where we ran at most two workshops or trainings a year. It has been a tour de force of building out entirely new events, fine-tuning existing ones, and exploring new and interactive ways to connect and learn online.

We have a lot to be proud of; the introduction of Discord as a homebase for informal conversations, events, and deeper discussions around the work we do has provided a space for connection across the broader Reclaim community, and it feels good and right! Curating these moments and spaces has been a top priority for Reclaim Hosting since its inception, and with the welcome updates to community.reclaimhosting.com, and we’re excited to be at this point some ten years later. It is a pleasure to be able to walk the walk of an edtech and build out compelling, communal learning environments to do this work.

We’re energized about what’s to come, and Reclaim EdTech is certainly not going anywhere. We’re kicking off year two as an opportunity to learn from at least one of the lessons from year one: all flex courses will be free and openly available to the community. From the beginning we struggled with keeping these courses behind a paywall, but at the same time we were starting a brand new division of Reclaim Hosting and were not entirely sure how we were going to pay for it. Capitalism! But throughout the year we realized these courses were being found well after the fact, and their value was much more inline with outreach and education about possibilities at Reclaim than a product in and of themselves.

This led us to shift our thinking around Reclaim Edtech more generally going into year two. As of June 2023 there will no longer be subscription costs associated with Discord or flex courses, but rather it will be part and parcel of our support offerings for institutional clients. We will continue to charge a one-time registration cost for multi-day workshops and trainings, but otherwise Reclaim EdTech will be yet another service we offer educational technologists who want exposure to new approaches, applications, and ideas in the sphere of learning technologies. What’s more, going forward we also want to ensure members of this community have the opportunity to participate and help run some of these offerings so it is not only Reclaim Hosting assuming the role of expert/practitioner.

We hope these changes will make our regular events that much more accessible, given we recognize that the value of Reclaim EdTech is in the process of building community and engaging existing and potential members more than a subscription-based service that might preclude portions of our community from fully engaging in what’s possible.

Thanks to everyone involved for participating in events and helping us think through the possibilities of Reclaim EdTech over this last year. For more information about what’s to come, make sure to check out the following: Event Calendar, Community Site, Discord Server

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Where did I leave off in part 1 of this post? Oh yeah, that’s right I stopped after narrating the magic that was the Gasta session because in many ways it represents a natural break because the energy was so intense that immediately afterwards my head was spinning. It was ostensibly an impossible session to follow, but the programming committee knew what they were doing when the put Anna Wendy Stevenson in that spot, because her keynote was brilliant. In many ways it was a practical counter-part to Rikke Toft Norgard’s speculative vision of hyper hybrid futures that got us started that morning.

OER23, Inverness, 5th and 6th April 2023.
Here, Anna-Wendy Stevenson (UHI) gives the Plenary. Image Credit: Tim Winterburn

Stevenson’s talk grounded everyone in the room by discussing the completely online, distributed music degree offered through the University of the Highlands. This program highlights an alternative to ways online has been imagined for more than a decade (i.e. MOOCs) that often trump-up efficiency and scale, but to echo Martin Weller’s point in his OER23 reflection post, Anna-Wendy’s talk highlighted how distance ed “allows people to stay embedded in their local culture.” This has particular resonance for the music, culture, and language of the islands off Scotland, but it’s also a vision of distance ed that travels well beyond that context, and her keynote really made me think of the culture around ds106 (all great things do) and the fact she followed up this brilliant talk with an reception concert consisting of her playing traditional songs from that region alongside three of the program’s graduates, it powerfully tied it all together.

OER23, Inverness, 5th and 6th April 2023
Drinks and dinner reception at An Lochran. Image Credit: Tim Winterburn

And that marked the official close of the program for Day 1 of OER23, but that was by no means the end of the day! The energy was pretty amazing as you can imagine, and upon returning to downtown Inverness from campus, some of the participants met up at the Black Isle Brewery, that just happens to serve some amazing pizza. We ate there the night before in the “pizza huts” on the roof, as Lauren has documented on her fine “Mini-Moments at OER23” post.

Great pizza and conversation on the rooftop of Black Isle (alternate caption: dinner in a Pizza Hut). Image and caption credit: Lauren Hanks

The nice thing about the social events at OER23 was that they were not over-engineered. It was come as you please, stay as you like, and feel free to avoid them all together. I do think while it was awesome to be face-to-face again, it could also be both awkward and exhausting given it’s been a minute. After a full day I was tempted to have a quick pizza and soda and then quietly tap out to work on the following day’s presentation. But, the company at Back Isle was amazing (no surprise there), so when Joe Wilson (who has a great post about the event—as so many have now) mentioned karaoke at nearby Johnny Foxes I knew my presentation prep would have to wait. I love me some karaoke, and a crew from the Black Isle merrily made their way over, which means a built-in audience What happened after that? Well, let me tell you….

OER23, Inverness, 5th and 6th April 2023.
“Another barnstorming performance from Jim Groom.” Image Credit: Tim Winterburn

As the images above from the ridiculously talented Tim Winterburn might suggest, it’s a story I tried to tell before. In fact, this is me relating what happened at Johnny Foxes that night. I look pretty animated, don’t I? That’s because I was, Johnny Foxes was awesome, but not because my karaoke was any good, but because the place—like Inverness more generally—was yet another character in the story of OER23, and this pub just happened to host Wednesday night karaoke, and folks just happened to come to sing and dance and have fun. OER23 attendee Antonio Arboleda brought his A-game with a brilliant rendition of La Bamba. After seeing that I wanted in, so I requested a spot knowing it would be as much as an hour wait. But I was having fun and chatting about conferences past and present so no worries. After about 30 minutes or so Tom Farrelly was called for his song, which was AC/DC’s “It’s a Long Way to the Top,” but the crowd had changed since Antonio sang. Before it was a small, fairly subdued crowd, but in the ensuing 30 minutes the bar had filled up with a squadron of 20-somethings and the energy was dialed up several notches. I was beginning to regret requesting to sing given this was not my Gen-X bretheren anymore, and my Pixies song was not likely to resonate.

I’m not sure if Tom had these same misgivings, but that did not stop him from getting up an absolutely killing his song. It was really something to behold. The crowd was in it, and he was grooving, and I heard there may even be video or two out there, but I can neither confirm nor deny such things. But even after Tom sang the place got even more intense, someone pulled out “Hotel California” and it was a full-on stadium-like sing-along. I was beginning to shake in my boots, a couple of songs followed and I was debating ducking out, but folks like Kate Molloy, Joe Wilson, Tanya Elias, and Bonnie Stewart kept me accountable. So, they called my name and I sang “Debaser” and it was a blast. I don’t remember much given I was in outer-body mode. But I do know I lost my voice from the raucous screaming, and it just so happens Kate Molloy caught it for posterity—probably for worse than better. I still can’t watch it given I know it will never be as good as I thought it sounded in my head, and I have enough disappointment already looking in the mirror, so I don’t need an interactive version that yells at me

It was an absolute blast, but that was not even the highlight. Soon after a twenty-something got on the stage and did the Rocky Horror Picture Show tune “Time Warp” and the entire place was on its feet doing the dance. The place blew up! It was absolutely off-the-hook amazing, and as I was leaving the bar soon after Bonnie and I compared notes and it was clear that what we just experienced in Johnny Foxes was truly special, and that was the way day one of OER23 ended for me. Walking back to my hotel room without a voice, an under-prepared presentation, and a sense of absolute bliss I have felt few other times in my life. That is what I was trying to communicate in the polyptych above, and this two part post, but it may also just might be true you had to be there.

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Reclaim Hosting’s new Community page which aggregates all our various community spaces online

It’s been live for a bit now, but I am finally getting around to writing a bit about Reclaim Hosting’s new micro-site that essentially aggregates all the different channels that we use to communicate the work we do more broadly. Lauren Hanks spear-headed this project, and worked with Taylor Jadin and Tom Woodward to build out the site using Bryan Mathers’ TV set art to communicate those channels with pizzazz!

There isn’t an individual thing that automatically makes a ‘Capital C’ Community, but rather a bunch of small, intentional moments that, when combined, is rather special.

The above quote from Lauren Hanks’s post about her working designing the community site really captures the spirit of how Reclaim Hosting has been community building over the last decade. Small, intentional interactions across our various platforms to connect with others in authentic ways. So this project was an attempt to take stock of the various places we do this, not only so we have a clearer sense of our community but also as an opportunity to clean up our namespaces a bit. Since almost the beginning the community.reclaimhosting.com subdomain has been home to our Discourse forum, but as we’ve added additional elements like our Reclaim Roundup newsletter, Discord server, more consistent video production as part of the Reclaim EdTech push (much of which came to be as recently as last year). We quickly realized the forums were just one slice of the broader Reclaim community, so to that end we created a broader umbrella to try and capture the various channels we’re currently using to communicate and interact.

Reclaim EdTech’s Watch site, inspired by the YouTube/Discord mashup that drove OERxDOmains21

The fine-tuning of those channels is still a work-in-progress. Reclaim EdTech’s Watch site, based on the YouTube/Discord mashup that drove OERxDomains21, is a thing of beauty for the way it integrates those two technologies so seamlessly, but I would like for us to do more with PeerTube in the coming months to make that an equally viable alternative to YouTube. Building out these environments is not simply marketing, although it is that, it’s also us doing the work of edtech’s to experiment with spaces that bring people together to connect and encourage them to share the work they’re doing. It’s not easy work, and if you are lucky you’ll have as many wins as losses. But it’s the work I enjoy most, playing with these environments to see what sticks, and sharing how we did it along the way. It’s the best kind of open, iterative practice, and it fits well with my penchant to try and blog everything

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Things have been moving pretty fast between travel, amazing conferences, Reclaim awesomeness, etc., that I’m bound to fall behind or even miss a few things on the old bava.blog. But one video I wanted to post was a conversation Lauren and I had about building out Reclaim Hosting’s Discord server. It was the first installment of our 3-part flex-course focused on “Building Community with Discord.” This episode aired on Tuesday, April 5th, and the flex-course is finishing up tomorrow with the final installment, “The Future of Discord at Reclaim,” which airs at 12 Pm ET.

Lauren did all the heavy lifting on building the various iterations of our Discord servers, and in this session she walks-through her work and even shares a template for others to build off. My role is simply to narrate some of Reclaim’s history with Discord, as well as add some color commentary. The bits that are fun in terms of that history is how the OERxDomains21 conferences experience, which used Discord as its backbone, was inspired by various influences such as Cloudflare.tv, exptv.org, and the Digital Ocean Deploy conference in 2020. These three examples helped us frame what we wanted for OERxDomains21, which was also the moment where we realized Discord will be crucial for just about everything we wanted to do for that conference when it came to creating a sense of community.

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Two posts in two days! I’m trying to get in a better rhythm of writing more, and we’ll see if it lasts. Today I wanted to share one of the things I’m doing with the site for our upcoming conference, Reclaim Open, to pull in post metadata. This is by no means groundbreaking stuff, but it was kind of a cool workaround so I wanted to share. I know there are mixed opinions about Elementor, Gutenberg, and other site editors for WordPress, and honestly I’m still trying to work out how I feel about them myself. But in the meantime, I am using Elementor on reclaimopen.com, mostly because I’m familiar with it at this point and it was a fast way to get the look that I wanted for the site.

One of the things I’ve been working through over the last few days (and weeks leading up until now) has been collecting speaker information, building out a 3-day conference agenda, and now working to get it on the website. Displaying simultaneous tracks of conference sessions in an elegant way with quick time changes can quickly look messy and confusing, and then adding in presentation abstracts is a whole other thing entirely. Abstracts vary in length, include links & other resources, and need to be embedded in a way that doesn’t disrupt the larger schedule view. For previous conferences, I’ve added a toggle feature to expand session blocks if someone is interested in learning more about a particular talk, but it still doesn’t look the best on a desktop. For example, here’s a screenshot from the Domains19 Day One Schedule:

^Most folks are checking from their phones during the conference, but still, the spacing is not great.For the Reclaim Open schedule, I’ve decided instead to publish each abstract as a blog post that can be linked in session blocks, which will look something like this:

Having a dedicated blog post for each presentation also allows me to share a bit more information about the speaker, session focus, related links, etc. because space is no longer a factor. Lastly, proposal submissions were already sitting in blog post draft form because Gravity Forms is amazing.

Elementor allows you to create a theme template to be applied to all single posts. I designed one to look something like this:

Title at the top, session information (metadata) on the left, abstract (post content) on the right.

The metadata piece is why I’m writing this post– the focus and length of the session are being pulled in by categories and tags, respectively. Elementor doesn’t have a great way to filter categories/tags using the single post widgets, so I needed to come up with an alternate way to pull in speaker info. I didn’t want to create an individual user account in the WordPress dashboard for the post to recognize a different post “author” (i.e. session speaker), but I still wanted a way to pull that information in automatically and dynamically. Enter Custom Fields!

At the bottom of a single blog post, I added the Custom Field called Speaker:

Then at the bottom of each blog post, I added the speaker names in the Value field. Next, I went to configure items on the Single Post theme template with the following settings:

^ Focus is set to Terms > Categories^ Speaker is set to Custom > Post Custom Field > Speaker^ Length is set to Terms > TagsAfter saving those edits, I tested to make sure that data is changing based on my adjustments to tag & category selections, as well as whatever is listed as the Value for the custom Speaker field.

And (courtesy of hipsum.co) there you have it! Simple and effective. :)

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I’m feeling extra grateful that I was able to attend and present at OER23 in person in Inverness, Scotland this year, and I can’t believe that the conference has already come and gone. This was my first in person event since OER19, and I had forgotten how inspiring it can be to meet with friendly faces on the ground for 2+ days and be challenged about the work that we encounter daily. I found that this trip for me was made up of so many special little moments, so rather than attempt to share one big Lesson, I’d rather just share the mini moments through photos and notes that I scribbled along the way.

things that were never far– polaroid camera, coffee, and the OER23 Programhonored to take a tour of the #FemEdTech Quilt 2 by Frances Bellsaying cheese with Maren!sitting in on Bryan Mather‘s workshop, A bluffer’s guide to Visual Thinking – a really creative way start to the conference.Things I overheard during Bryan’s Workshop:

Everyone has a unique perspective.
[in reference to brainstorming] Start in the middle and expand out instead of top to bottom.
The more you notice, the more you wonder. The more you wonder, the more you notice.

Great pizza and conversation on the rooftop of Black Isle (alternate caption: dinner in a Pizza Hut)quick photo from Rikke Toft Nørgård‘s keynote presentation, Hyper-Hybrid Futures. So much awesomeness on one slide!“When something is normalized it is no longer hybrid. Is it just that thing.”

Adam Stroud’s talk about transforming Instructional Leadership courses at Oklahoma State UniversityChealsye Bowley and Jaimie Henthorn’s OER Ecosystem in reference to defining OER for legislation in the state of ColoradoOER Ecosystem – a collection from conversations & presentations at #OER23 (also referencing The Next Generation Digital Learning Environment: A Report on Research from my presentation with Jim further down):

interoperability
personalization
analytics
advising
learning assessment
collaboration
accessibility
universal design
equitable access
diverse representation in learning materials
cost savings
sustainability
best practices awareness

Tanya Elias‘ talk on different models of Scale: Production (standardization, narrowing the path) vs Growth (things can get bigger, faster, but not as unified or predictable)My doodle of Reclaim’s growth, combining both models based on community interest, available resources, capacity, and breakthroughs in techA powerful lineup of GASTA presentations hosted by Tom Farrelly – Image credit: Tim WinterburnWhat has still stuck with me during the GASTA presentations:

We are alone, together. This is how we go beyond.
Joy is affirmative personal ethics. Joy is built into everything from the start.

a quick meetup before walking across the UHI Inverness Campus for a reception

Really looking forward to Day 2 of @OERConf, doodles and all! Good morning, #oer23! pic.twitter.com/jvDru2kyOq

— Lauren Hanks (@brumface) April 6, 2023

Throwing paper airplanes during Dave Cormier‘s keynote, Learning in a time of abundance. (image credit: Tim Winterburn)

How do we find the right answers in a time of abundance?

Demonstrate our humility. This is the starting place.
Model the way we trust.
Show how we choose with our values

Fascinating talk from @DrDeanW about the hydra system and immersive learning systems at #OER23. Paired really nicely with @jimgroom’s thinking around the complexities of Web3 pic.twitter.com/UvcE5i9mIc

— Lauren Hanks (@brumface) April 6, 2023

“Twitter is just brands talking to brands.”

After Jim’s presentation on Web 2.0 vs Web3, Anne-Marie Scott commented that Web3 exposes the responsibilities of community building online– it’s no longer just hanging out.

Bonnie Stewart arguing that education needs to be geared towards handling the data during her talk on Open Education Projects in a Time of Enclosure – (slides)
I’ll end this post to say that Jim and I were able to present on Reclaim’s version of the NGDLE, or cloud-based ecosystem of diverse, open source applications. This presentation was exciting for many reasons: it allowed us to think back to Reclaim’s first approach to offering a set of tools outside of the LMS (Domain of One’s Own), and now how we’re building on that with the possibilities of open source applications outside of the LAMP stack (Reclaim Cloud). We got to lean on some of Bryan Mathers’ original sketches to help explain the complexities of container-based web hosting through shipping containers, which still works as a perfect metaphor and visual. Finally, I really enjoyed the discussion on how Reclaim can be a home base for both individual/sandbox projects as well as enterprise level, mission critical multi-region setups.

Reclaim containers – where users no longer need a dedicated server (and the costs associated) in order to run advanced or niche apps in the clouda Reclaim ecosystemWhile I have presented at other hybrid/virtual conferences and a handful of workshops and flex courses recently, it was nice to find a rhythm for talking to folks in person again– reading the room and feeding off the energy in the space. I’m even more stoked now for other events in the coming months like Reclaim Open and WPCampus 2023, as well as finding new and creative ways to talk about what’s cookin’ at Reclaim.

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I was wracking my brain before starting this post to ensure I was not wrong before proclaiming that OER23 will be the first face-to-face conference I’ve attended since Domains 2019 —is that possible? Has it really been almost four years since I was at event like this in-person? I’m not entirely certain because my mind cannot be fully trusted, but I think it’s true. We did a Reclaim Roadshow in Los Angeles in November 2019, and I think the next conference on the list after that was OER20, but by April 2020 that conference was forced to pivot fully online in just a couple of weeks. Oh the good old, early days of the global pandemic. Now to be clear I travelled a quite a bit during COVID to help build an arcade in Fredericksburg, VA, but in terms of the professional development and relationship building that conferences like OER23 afford, it’s been all online for nearly 48 months. Crazy!

Reclaim Cloud is made up of a bunch of containers that look like VHS tapes, true story

But next week that all changes because Lauren and I will be heading to Inverness, Scotland to present about the “ACTUAL” Next Generation Digital Learning Environment (spoiler: its containers!) and how Reclaim Cloud provides a powerful space for sandboxing the apps and infrastructure undergirding the present/future web.

I’ll also be doing another presentation focused on what happens when “Web 2.0 and Web3 Walk into a Bar…” or how these two moments of the web might be understood in relationship to one another. Having come up as a blogger during the hey day of Web 2.0 and sticking around long enough to watch the space shift towards more populated, centralized networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc., it’s been interesting to see the fediverse emerge as an alternative that’s intentionally resists platform centralization; questions the logic of amassing followers; and sneers at the seemingly inexorable logic of becoming a brand on social media.

That said, I struggle with these generalizations a bit because my introduction to Web 2.0 had much of the same liberatory rhetoric around moving the conversation away from mass media networks and creating independent nodes to publish and syndicate as one pleases with fairly easy to manage tools. It’s these unevenly reported parallels that fascinate me, so I’ll be trying to work through some of the early tenets of Web 2.0 (the social web) and Web3 (the federated web) to understand where there’s crossover and consider some of the realities that served to jettison the early optimism of Web 2.0. I figure it’s worth considering if and how any new instantiation of the web can resist the creep of capital.

Anyway, it’s a work in progress that I’ll continue to plug away at for the next several days. And then, if all goes well, I’ll get to share it on Thursday in a room with other colleagues at OER23 who might have similar questions. I relish the idea of connecting at OER23, it’s been way too long!

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Next Tuesday is the start of the free Reclaim EdTech Flex Course focused on building community on the social platform Discord. In the first episode airing on next week on April 4th at 12 PM Eastern Lauren Hanks and I will discuss some of the inspirations that led us to using the social platform Discord in combination with the live streaming service Streamyard to run our sessions for OERxDomains21.

MBS’s TV Guide-inspired design for theOERxDomains21 Schedule

That experience was so amazing on so many levels, and it led us to use that same combination soon after to run our Domains Workshop for admins in June of 2021 (still referred to as the Reclaim Roadshow). Lauren built out a template for the work she did during OERxDomains21 in Discord, as she will do, and over the course of the next year we used that for our workshops.

Our first full blown virtual workshop after OERxDomains21 integrating Discord and Streamyard to great effect

But we felt like we missing out on some of the potential for more sustained interactions and connections Discord offered, so we started imagining what it might be like to hold more regular events for our community in an always-on Discord server to start getting more intentional about outreach and community building. And in April 2022 a whole new division of EdTech at Reclaim Hosting was born using Discord and Streamyard as our primary means for running regular workshops and flex courses. We learned a lot in our first year and we’re planning on unveiling what’s in store for year two of Reclaim EdTech at Reclaim Open, but in the interim you should really join our Discord server next week to see how you, too, can build community in Discord!

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Darren Barefoot’s “Art for 2007 Northern Voice poster”

With just a little over two months before Reclaim Open happens I’m thankful we had the forethought to add a day before the official event to host an unconference. My first event of this kind was back in 2007 at Northern Voice’s MooseCamp, and I have to say it was transformative. If you follow the previous link you’ll see the sessions that were run that day,* and I have to say many of them seem quite relevant 15 years on.

But the thing about MooseCamp that was so special were the souls who showed up and worked together for the first hour or so to pitch topics they wanted to discuss, and as a result a schedule for the day emerged that was for and by the people. It allowed for an informal space for folks who may not have had the time or inclination to submit a formal presentation to share, which made room for all kinds of serendipitous connections, different voices, and impromptu discussions that were timely and relevant.

Image of the wall of sessions pitched the morning of MooseCamp
Image credit: Cyprien Lomas’s “Northern Voice 07 – MooseCamp”

What’s more, it was foundational for my own sense of an edtech blogging community that was thinking more broadly about how these new publishing forms would impact our culture—in many ways MooseCamp was far more memorable that the official event the following day, and part of that was because it took on the shape of those present in that moment in some truly powerful ways. Also, while only remotely connected to him as a result of the NorthVoice events I had participated in, I was really sorry to hear of the recent passing of one of the organizers of that amazing conference, namely Darren Barefoot—his final post in this world tells the tale of a life worth living.

I’ve since participated in other unconferences, mot recently the University API at BYU, and again found this sense of connection, generosity, and community generative for a memorable event, so I figured it was high time to try it for a Reclaim Hosting conference. And, as often happens, the need for is becoming increasingly more apparent. Just yesterday Shannon Hauser asked about whether we might be able to fit in another panel to our already full programme about web archiving. And while previously we might have had to politely turn it down, as of now we have an entire day wherein anyone can propose and run sessions about anything from web archiving to Geocities to photography to the fediverse to privacy and security, or whatever else folks with a shared interest care to come together and think through. It’s in many ways a huge attraction of Reclaim Open, the ability to show up for a full day where you can share your interests in the moment if you like, as well as support and learn from others who want to do the same. And who knows, you might even find some magic like I did back in 2007.

__________________________________

*Getting to run a session about using WordPress for “More Than Just a Blog” alongside Candace Nast and D’Arcy Norman remains one of my all-time favorite conference moments. People were truly in it.

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While I did happen to set a personal best on the Galaxian cabinet in the bavacade as my account was being migrated to our newest shared hosting server named after that 1979 classic alien space shooter, that’s not what this post is about. This post is about the amazing work Reclaim’s sysadmin Chris Blankenship has been doing behind the scenes to get our cPanel servers running on Ubuntu. It’s a long story and Chris does an amazing job narrating why we have to move our infrastructure from Centos7 to alternative Linux distros on his blog, but the short version is they killed Centos7 and Kenny, so we have come up with alternatives over the next 18-24 months. Read Chris’s post for the bigger, longer, and uncut version of the story.

via GIPHY

The milestone the post title refers to is running a cPanel server on top of Ubuntu rather than CentOS, the shared hosting server Galaxian located in Frankfurt, Germany is doing just that, and I believe we’ll have another, Galaga, running on the West Coast of the USA. It’s a big deal because we wanted to ensure in 2023 that all new shared hosting servers were were running on Ubuntu in order to future-proof our server fleet. The upgrading of our existing infrastructure will be a big job and we will be doing it over the course of at least two years, but this moment highlights the beginning of that shift, and that is really exciting. Sometimes the work of infrastructure can be not only invisible but thankless given the only time folks are knocking on their door is when something goes wrong. So join me in celebrating the awesome work happening, as hidden as it might be, when something not only goes right, but marks a path for moving our entire fleet of servers into the future. Avanti sysadmins of the world, and avanti Reclaim!

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During our regular audits of backup servers, our infrastructure team identified an issue with two hard drives being used in a RAID array on one of our backup servers, jetbackup2.reclaimhosting.com. Our server provider (OVH) replaced the hard drives, but after replacement the RAID array failed to rebuild itself. Attempts were made to recover data, however those have been unsuccessful. Our infrastructure team has since moved all impacted servers over to new backup locations and those are once again running successfully.

Extent of IncidentData recovery from 01 February to 16 March has been unsuccessful. Data includes standard cPanel account-level backups on impacted servers only. Reclaim Hosting does have multiple backup methods in place for redundancy, including Installatron application-level backups, JetBackup cPanel account-level backups, cPanel Backups manually generated by end users, and bare metal server-level backups. Relevant support guides can be referenced below:

Generating a Full cPanel Backup
Alternative Backup options in Installatron
Installatron Automated Backups and Restore
Working with JetBackup in cPanel

JetBackup backups running from 17 March and onwards are in tact. Reclaim Hosting is notifying the administrators of impacted servers directly for any other questions or concerns.

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About once a year we try to get the Reclaim team together in person to work alongside each other, brainstorm for the future, and spend some time together in a new city. In years past we have visited Portland, New York and Nashville, not including the trips for other workshops, conferences, and events. Every time we get together in person I always come away feeling really refreshed and motivated to work with such an awesome group of individuals. In Portland we came up with the idea to host our first conference, Domains17, and in New York we started thinking quite seriously about Cloudron, which ultimately put us on a path towards Reclaim Cloud. I think after the New York trip we really began to understand the value of making time for the Reclaim team to hang out in person without any other responsibilities. We also went through a lot of transition and growth– our team expanded, we traveled more for other conferences and workshops, and then later hosted Domains19. By the time we were ready for another team trip, COVID was in full effect, and like most, we turned inwards to recalibrate and focus on perfecting our virtual events. We co-hosted OERxDomains21, an event that I still look back on with so much pride and excitement, and then a virtual DoOO workshop later that year (which I’m realizing I never formally blogged about). When we felt comfortable enough to be in person again, our team had more than doubled and the Nashville trip required a bit more planning to make the most of our time. Out of that trip came the foundations for Reclaim EdTech year 1, Reclaim Roundup, a tiered way of thinking about Domains, failover in Reclaim Cloud, and adjustments to internal team processes.

We used the goals set in Nashville as a cornerstone throughout 2022 to keep our work intentional and focused. Now with the year behind us, I’m so proud of all we were able to accomplish. We exceeded those goals and worked on setting healthy habits for learning & collaboration more so than ever before. Given our team has continued to grow and we were ready to start 2023 with a fresh plan, it was high time to meet again.

Touching down in San Diegoview from my hotel windowThough far from home, San Diego was a great city for a team trip. We stayed at the Moxy Hotel in the Gaslamp Quarter, ate a ton of great food, and had seemingly endless options for things to do in our free time. That Thursday night we grabbed a quick bite to eat at Prince Street Pizza after everyone made it into town and then prepped for a full day of working/brainstorming in person.

hotel lobby where we met up before exploring san diego – board games everywhere. So many cool details in the hotel, but I think the room numbers were a favorite Fridaybrainstorming ideas for the dayLike in Nashville, Friday in San Diego was definitely the highlight for me. We rented out this working space and it turned out to be a pretty great experience. I really enjoyed having the opportunity to just think with the team for a while, especially since our daily work can be rather busy. Also like Nashville, I kicked off the morning with some icebreakers to ease folks into conversation. I tend to roll my eyes at the idea of forced fun and usually steer away from anything too cheesy, but there’s definitely value in having a bit of structure first thing, warming up and learning a little bit more about each other, and then slowly transitioning into aligned ideas for the day. Here are the starter questions I used, in order:

What do your family and friends think you do all day?
Would you rather stop watching movies or stop listening to music?
What is something you are great at cooking?
What is your go-to TV show at the moment?
What is 1 non-work related goal that you hope to achieve in the next 5 years?
What are 3 words you hope a customer would use to describe Reclaim?
Where/When is Reclaim Hosting the expert? Similarly, when/where is Reclaim Hosting not the expert?

The first 5 questions took our group about ~30 min to get through, and we spent the remainder of that hour tackling the last 2 questions. We wrote answers down on a whiteboard– a visual during trips that is becoming increasingly helpful for us. Even before jumping into all the various topics that could have been discussed, I wanted folks to remember the why we do what we do, and the who we do it for.

For question #6, we saw words like empathetic, trustworthy, collaborative, responsive, innovative, welcoming, and helpful. In coming up with this initial list, I thought it was interesting that words like speedy or fast didn’t come up, yet they’re extremely important to us. The team agreed that being timely was the natural result of acting with empathy and respect when working with customers, and the trip was already worth it for me at that point. This is something that I want to hold close and reinforce often for our team and anyone else that we hope to hire in the future.

Tim, Goutam, and I – photo by Tom WoodwardOne of the other things that became abundantly clear on this day, besides the sheer amount awesome work happening, is the fact that it’s not really possible for us to break out into strict teams for brainstorming. This is certainly a change from where we were in Nashville, and one that I think is indicative of the intentional habits we set last year to encourage collaboration around the work that we do. This doesn’t mean that internal Reclaim teams don’t exist, but each person has their foot in projects that impact some or all teams. To say, “ok Support, Infrastructure, Sales, and EdTech folks– split out and talk about what’s working/not working in your team,” is simply not possible, or at the very least, not helpful. For example, Infrastructure and EdTech folks are regularly assisting in Support, and Support is heavily mixed in with Infrastructure and Sales. EdTech and Sales work in close collaboration, and they both have a hand in the work that’s pushed to Infrastructure.

The cross-collaboration that’s happening at Reclaim gives everyone a voice for new ideas and handling challenges. This past January 2023 was also our largest month for internal professional development with at least 1-2 sessions scheduled each week. That kind of open, regular learning is something that we had dreamed about for our team only a few short years ago. Instilling healthy working practices (something I spent most of the summer thinking about) can take time to introduce, and even more time for habits to form. It has been so amazing to see this gradual transition over the last year, and even cooler to have that culminate on Friday.

One of the things I want to be mindful about as we kick off a new year is that we don’t let this collaboration work against us. For example, in order to make decisions or progress forward, does someone have to wait for approval from all teams? Ingrained collaboration means that no particular person or team is siloed or left to own work without the support of their peers. But we still want to make sure that someone is owning and pushing the work forward, and that things aren’t slowing down because of processes we’ve put in place. I suppose this is a symptom of growing pains more than anything, but I think being aware of those dangers will be important.

We’re missing Gordon, but cool to have almost everyone in one picture! Thanks Tom Woodward for capturing this. Last thing I’ll say about Friday– there was SO many things to chat about! A larger group = more work happening = more to discuss. There was definitely too much to cover for one single working day, which may be a sign that we need an extended trip in future years (two working days?) or that maybe there’s a need for more regular planning conversations like this throughout the year. We have also refreshed how we are handling meetings in 2023 – something for a future post – and perhaps that will play a role in what’s needed for next year’s trip. We shall see!

After some downtime at the hotel, we ended the evening with dinner & games at Punch Bowl Social. I don’t have many pictures from this evening, but it was fun to grab a bite to eat while we were waiting our turn for some bowling lanes to open up. After bowling, some folks even stayed around karaoke. I really recommend this space if you’re looking for a little something for everyone!

SaturdayThe next morning, we met for breakfast at Fig Tree Cafe (delicious by the way) and then headed to the San Diego Zoo! This was the biggest zoo that I’ve visited, and I’ll admit that I may have gotten a little too excited about the koalas and giraffes. :) I thought the layout of the zoo was really well thought out, and it allowed our team to leisurely walk through different exhibits & stop for food breaks along the way. I’ll spare you the shaky animal photos I took and instead share some photos that Tom captured:

reclaim team at the zoo – photo linkGoutam, Meredith, Taylor, Amanda, and Noah scoping out a game plan – photo linktaking a quick break with the OG reclaimers – photo linkkilling time before axe throwingAbout halfway through the day some people wanted to split and go check out the Comic-Con Museum while the rest continued on with the full zoo experience. I don’t think anyone planned on being at the zoo (or even in this part of San Diego) all day, but it worked out! There was great weather, a lot of walking around, and a lot of down time to hang out.

After making it back to the hotel for a little break, we met for dinner at La Puerta. I think this might’ve been my favorite meal of the whole weekend… the food and drinks were amazing.

From there we said goodbye to the early morning travelers and then walked over to a place called Throw It! for some good ole fashioned axe throwing. LOL. It also just so happened that there was a line of arcade games right when you walk in the door, so I have to think that everyone felt right at home!

Overall, I’m feeling really thankful that I was able to attend this trip, and equally thankful that I get to work with such a creative, impressive team. Looking forward to all the projects and ideas that came from this weekend, and already can’t wait for the next trip!

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Today I did a stream talking all about my desk setup! I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time, but after wrapping up the Reclaim EdTech OBS flex course, now felt like a good time.

The main trick with my setup is it’s designed to work with both my Macbook Pro, which I use for work and of course runs macOS, as well as my gaming PC, which runs Windows. Not only that, but I want to be able to use my dual monitors, all my peripherals like keyboard, mouse, and stream deck, and my audio gear and camera. You can watch the stream archive for more info on what I need it to do, as well as how it all works.

The gist of it is everything is plugged into my Gigabyte M27Q monitors, which switch everything between the two computers:

Your browser does not support the video tag.Here is a diagram how everything plugs in, with links to everything:

Finally, here are some odds and ends that I talked about in the stream, but aren’t on the diagram:

Vivo dual monitor stand
Wave Mic Arm LP
Cable management stuff:
- Ikea signum cablem management tray
- Nano tape
- Command strips
- Amazon cable managemetn fun pack
- Cable sleeve zipper

VIVO Dual LCD LED 13 to 27 inch Monitor Desk Mount Stand, Heavy Duty Fully Adjustable, Fits 2 Screens, STAND-V002

[4 Pack] JOTO Cable Management Sleeve, 19-20 Inch Cord Organizer System with Zipper for TV Computer Office Home Entertainment, Flexible Cable Sleeve Wrap Cover Wire Hider System -Black

Elgato Wave Mic Arm LP - Premium Low Profile Microphone Arm with Cable Management Channels, Desk Clamp, Versatile Mounting and Fully Adjustable, Perfect for Podcast, Streaming, Gaming, Home Office

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File this in “blog it before I forget it.”

Recently I was making a GIF for Lauren based on an idea she had related to Multi-region WordPress Hosting. I have a bunch of different tools that I use when working with GIFs, and I sort of think of them in three categories:

Taking a pre-existing video and making it into a GIF
Making tweaks to a pre-existing GIF
Video editing tools

If I had to break it all down the way I GIFs can be summed up into: Turn something in to a video, then turn that video in to a GIF. Its just the tools I use to accomplish that differ depending on the time I have and the complexity of what I’m trying to do.

Taking a pre-existing video and making it into a GIFThis one is relatively straightforward. There are a lot of tools that do this, but in my opinion by far the best one in terms of quickly getting good quality at small file sizes is Gifski. It was originally a command line tool, but also has a very simple and slick GUI version for macOS. Looking at the website now, it looks like it has a GUI for Windows as well that I haven’t used yet. I’m typically using the macOS GUI, and it lets you drag a video file in, trim it and resize it, and adjust quality settings.

A screenshot of a GIF of a GIF in the making The great thing about a tool this simple is it makes it easy to make things quickly by feeding it all sorts of video. Clips from YouTube, screen recordings I make, etc. There are tons of possibilities!

Making tweaks to a pre-existing GIFThis is sort of a weird between-y workflow. I could do this stuff using the tools in category 3, but sometimes that’s more complicated or time consuming than I want. If I have a GIF, (or maybe a GIF I just made from a video using Gifski), but I just want to crop the GIF, change the frame rate, or add simple text or images to the GIF, I like to use GIF Brewery.

Unfortunately, this tool hasn’t been updated in a while and I think it’s been pulled from the Mac App Store. That being said, it still works for me and has a place in my toolbox. I think in the long-term, the stuff I do in GIF Brewery will be replaced by the tools I’m putting in my third category.

Video editing toolsWhen the first two categories of tools above fail me, I turn to Final Cut Pro.1 This is a workflow I’m just recently getting comfortable with, but I’ve learned that with Final Cut’s masking tools, animation features using key frames, and a whole bunch of other stuff I’m still learning about, I can do quite a bit of cool things. The problem with this is what I’m left with is a video file, not a GIF! Final Cut does have GIF export, but the size of files it produces are massive, and the quality is usually not that great either, so I use a different approach. Originally, I would export a mov or mp4 file, then use the macOS GUI for Gifski to make a nice small and high quality GIF.

That being said, I found two problems with that approach, which is ultimately why I’m writing this surprisingly long blog post. Basically, problem #1 is this result doesn’t let me make GIFs with transparent backgrounds, and problem #2 is I can’t make GIFs at non-standard resolutions. Final Cut typically wants to export video at typical 16x9 aspect ratios with resolutions like 1920x1080. Here’s my new workflow to fix both of these issues:

Step 1: Create the GIF using Final Cut Pro and send it to CompressorThe first step is to make the GIF using Final Cut Pro’s tools! Instead of exporting the video straight out of Final Cut, I use Compressor, which is Apple’s advanced video 2 compression and export tool. I can do this by going to File –> Send to Compressor –> New Batch

Step 2: Crop and Export from Compressor as an image sequenceIn compressor I drag the TIFF Image Sequence preset on to the project, then select my export location, crop the image, and set the output to PNG, as TIFF is more quality than I need. Once I’ve done that, I start the export with the Start Batch button.

A GIF of a GIF of a GIF in the making This allows me to crop the image to whatever size I want. Secondly, instead of outputting a video file, it outputs a series of images, which will preserve transparency if my GIF has it. After the export is done, I’m left with a series of images in a folder, but not a GIF. That part comes next!

Step 3: Use the Gifski CLI to combine the images into a GIF!Now I can use Gifski to assemble a gif out of those images! Unfortunately the macOS GUI version of Gifski doesn’t support this, but the command line version does. I used homebrew to install the Gifski CLI:

brew install gifski Then I cd into the folder where my images have been exported and run this command to assemble them into a GIF!

gifski --fps 30 --width 480 -o out.gif *.png A couple notes on the above command:

--fps 30 sets the FPS of the GIF. 30 is actually quite high for a typical gif, most of the ones you see are 15 or lower, but in this case I wanted smoooooth motion.
--width 480 will resize the GIF proportionally. You can leave this option off if resizing is not needed.
-o out.gif tells Gifski to name the file out.gif
*.png will tell Gifski to look at every .png file in the folder when making the GIF

Here’s the end result, and its less than a megabyte!3

Final Cut Pro and Compressor are expensive, but they are thankfully NOT subscriptions (I really don’t want to use Adobe stuff). I bought my copy through the Pro Apps Bundle for Education nearly 6 years ago and it’s still being updated and I’m still using it. That bundle is definitely the way to go if you are an educator. ︎
and audio, and apparently still images too! ︎
Final Cut DOES have a native GIF export, but the file sizes are huge for similar quality. I couldn’t get it under 5 Mb, which is way too big. ︎

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Yesterday Maren Deepwell, Kerry Pinny, Taylor Jadin and I ran the first of three sessions introducing Mission Mastodon. “What is that?” you wisely ask. Well, it’s a collaboration between ALT and Reclaim Edtech to provide a temporary server for folks interested in exploring the federated social networking platform Mastodon. It’s a sandbox space to experiment with signing-up, finding people you follow elsewhere, wrapping your head around content search, as well as re-programming ourselves to think beyond the large, monolithic sites that have come to dominate online social spaces.

Of course the attention economy is threatened by the Fediverse

Jon Udell’s recent post “Of course the attention economy is threatened by the Fediverse” discusses how a federated tool like Mastodon subverts the underlying attention economy driving the influencer culture most of the corporate social media giants have embraced. What if some of us aspire to something other than broadcast celebrity, what if we actually want to be social in the most generative sense of that word. To quote Udell:

I just want to hang out online with people whose words and pictures and ideas intrigue and inspire and delight me, and who might feel similarly about my words and pictures and ideas.

Hope springs eternal in this digital optimist, and those netizens like Udell who have worked hard for several decades to underline the myriad issues with networked culture while remaining focused on trying to build and promote a better, healthier web are my heroes. And I can even follow and talk to them on these miraculous networks. To misquote the Bard: “Sign me up for this brave new web, that has such people in it!”

But I digress, I just wanted to link to our first session, and thanks those who showed up in the chat and made it that much better. It was a lot of fun to talk about how Mastodon feels different (in many of the ways quoted above), but also to chat and share useful tips and tricks that might come in useful as you’re getting started.

You can watch the video here, as well as the future episodes in February and March. Also, be sure to check out the chat happening on Reclaim’s Discord, which you can access from the linked watch. I highly recommend the conversation given there some great resources shared by folks, including this list of annotated Mastodon resources Chris Aldrich has been collecting. Finally, if nothing else, watch the video above for Kerry Pinny’s 55 second intro that is absolutely brilliant! I love that my nickname is now “the Joker!”

Anyway, if you are at all intrigued by any of this, join us in this expendable Mastodon server that will explode in ~~90~~ 89 days….

https://thismastodonwillexplo.de

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Reclaim Hosting is thrilled to partner with ALT over the next several months—starting next week!—to offer 3 fun, informative sessions over as many months focused on Mastodon. Hope to see you in the self-destructing Mastodon server soon!

It might be best to read this post with the following theme music playing….

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to join our Mastodon server and have some fun! As always, should you or any member misbehave, the Server will disavow any knowledge of your actions (and ban you). Good luck!

ALT and Reclaim EdTech are a group of rogue nerds who have hi-jacked a Mastodon server and are opening it up to other interested folks. They will be running live online sessions which you are tasked to intersect. The sessions are open to all and free to attend so you should have no issues accessing them here. The sessions will offer interested parties valuable intelligence around how the federated social media software Mastodon works, with everything from joining a server, to helping them find their way around, as well as providing a peek behind the scenes of the moderating and hosting process. We need you to join the sessions, participate and report back.

Session 1: Mission briefing: 19 January 2023 at 16:00 GMT (Watch Live)
Session 2: Verifying your progress: 23 February 2023 at 16:00 GMT (Watch Live)
Session 3: 30 days until self-destruct: 23 March 2023 at 16:00 GMT (Watch Live)

For any of the above sessions you can join the Reclaim Discord server to intercept any messages during the live broadcasts: https://reclaimed.tech/discord

The server will self-destruct 90 days from the first session, so you have a limited time to gather as much information as possible. The successful outcome of the mission—and the potential salvation of the social web—is in your hands. Don’t mess it up like some others who will remain nameless for reasons of international security.

As always, if you are discovered we will deny any knowledge of this mission. This message will self-destruct in….

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For the 35th episode of Reclaim Today, I had the distinct pleasure to sit down with professor Riv-Ellen Prell and artist Livia Foldes to discuss their collaborative project A Campus Divided: Progressives, Anticommunists, Racism, and Antisemitism at the University of Minnesota, 1930-1942. This website was born alongside a physical exhibit highlighting a history of surveillance and segregation at the university that spanned more than a decade, which was un-earthed by the research of Sarah Atwood—then a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies. The physical exhibit was immensely popular, while at the same time underscoring ongoing struggles and tensions not only at UMN, but across the US political landscape more generally.

The exhibit coincided with the early days of the Trump presidency’s racist and anti-Semitic dog whistling, in particular the “Unite the Right” rally on the University of Virginia’s campus in August 2017. That is the context for this historical deep-dive into campus-specific racist, anti-semitic, and ~~antifa~~ anticommunist rhetoric in the 1930s, a powerful moment wherein the struggle between the university administration and student activists in the 1930s might provide one way of understanding the contemporary national political stage as the exhibit opened.

Given the broader national situation, Prell and Foldes did not want to stop at a limited-run physical exhibit, so they decided to digitize these documents and design a home for them online that would not only make this archive readily available, but through a powerful design highlight the urgency and importance of activism when faced with the abuse of power. Watch the entire interview to get a sense of this truly important academic and design work that these scholar/artist/activists have made openly available to not only understand the past, but help put our present moment into that much sharper focus.

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Every so often my blog hits a random milestone, and this one happened to come at the start of my 18th year of blogging, and the very end of 2022. Given that, I figured I would use it as an excuse to blog about blogging. This post is lucky number 3700, and if you divide that by the 204 months I have been blogging that is just over 18 blog posts a month since December 2005. That averages out to a new blog every other day. That’s amore!

This year that pace was more along the lines of every 3 days with a total of 126 posts overall, but my streak of blogging at least once a month every month since 2005 is still going strong. The iron man of blogging, if nothing else! The topics I have blogged about this year are telling, with the biggest percentage of posts being Reclaim and/or Reclaim Cloud, coming in at 81. There were 18 posts about bavacade and 11 posts highlighting the bavaweekly, that I hope to resurrect next year. There were 6 posts syndicated in from bavaradio (I was not great at keeping that site updated with latest radio shows), and another random 10 posts about various topics.

This year has been all Reclaim Hosting all the time and my blog reflects as much. I’ve had a lot of fun with Reclaim Cloud, and we continue to imagine new horizons for the future which keeps it exciting. And while for many a year I felt I was the last of a dying tribe writing into the blog void or navel gazing with every new post, it seems like the idea of regularly attending to your online plot and cultivating the soil is entering a new day. I see that most clearly with the uptick of blogging by the folks I work with at Reclaim Hosting. It has been an absolute joy to see Lauren, Meredith, Taylor, Chris, Pilot, Amanda, and now Noah all blogging this year. As a collective we had well over 200 blog posts, and something tells me we’re just getting started!

In fact, the work Pilot has done with Reclaim Roundup is in many ways the company meta-blog/newsletter that brings together all the work we do as a team and shares it monthly. Rather than one voice, it captures the work of an emergent team that is finding its rhythm and coming together in some truly magical ways. This many Reclaimers blogging and sharing their work is a powerful portent for the great things to come in 2023. Reclaim Hosting was in many ways built on the back of the blog, so it only makes sense we carry that torch and share where we are, how we got there, and where we are going. #4life!

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Back in July of 2020, and again in September of 2020, I wrote about tracking costs in Reclaim Cloud.

Costs in the Cloud

A Follow-up on Costs in the Cloud

Two years later things have developed a fair amount with my personal use of Reclaim Cloud, and I think it’s worth sharing because as I move more and more of my web properties to the cloud, the costs have changed quite a bit from the $87.96 I was spending monthly in September of 2020. In fact, I’m now spending close to $400 per month for my Reclaim Cloud environments alone, not to mention my Cloudflare bill and my terrible domain habit Anyway, below is the billing breakdown by environment for the first 30 days of December 2022:

December 2022 costs by environment for my personal Reclaim Cloud

I went from 12 environments in 2020 to 21 environments in 2022. My monthly bill went from $87.96 in September of 2020 to $397.45 for the first 30 days of December. That is a significant jump, and it’s worth looking at how those costs break down. I have roughly two main groups of servers I manage. The first is the bava fleet of servers, which includes the bava.blog (in stereo), bava.tv (PeerTube), bavaghost (Ghost), bavacast (Owncast), bavameet (Jitsi), bavasocial (Mastodon), and two WordPress backup environments with three days of on-demand backups of the blog across two different regions. Let’s look at the numbers:

bavacast $8.51 (Owncast instance I should probably keep off unless in use)
bavacast-clone $0.02 (temp environment while moving bavacast to 1-click installer)
bavaghost $19.61 (Instance of Ghost I am running alongside my blog)
bavameet $2.93 (Jitsi instance I only turn on when needed)
bavamulti-1 $24.52 (WordPress Multiregion primary site for the bava.blog)
bavamulti-2 $24.49 (WordPress Multiregion secondary site for the bava.blog)
bavasocial $25.18 (Test Mastodon instance for bava.blog I’m still playing with)
bavatube $33.81 (PeerTube instance that hosts over 1000 videos)
bavatube-clone $14.21 (Clone of PeerTube to test version 5 upgrade)
env-7614939 $5.21 (Regular nightly backups of bava.blog on UK environment)
env-9758267 $1.12 (Regular nightly backups of bava.blog on WC environment)

This comes to a subtotal of $159.61. If I was a bit more frugal I could probably eliminate $60-$70 by turning bavacast off more regularly, getting rid of the bavatube-clone, abandon the multiregion setup, and deciding not to run a separate mastodon instance for bavatuesdays. By eliminating those environments I can easily keep the personal hosting bill for the bava properties well below $100 per month. Not necessarily cheap by shared hosting standards, but the difference is what you can do. I’m running a pretty ridiculous multiregion setup that is overkill for my blog, but a testing ground for what is possible for sites that need to stay up no matter what. This is that space where my personal sites overlap with my professional research and development, so being able to spend the money to be able to run a lot of these next-generation apps that would never run in cPanel is crucial.

Also, I think the elephant in the room is owning your own media and managing it comes at a steep cost. Using YouTube or wordpress.com or Zoom or Twitch would be arguably cheaper, but not only would I feel dirty, but the cost is their terms and my data. Freedom ain’t free! So it is worth it for me to have the route around those options when possible to explore alternatives at a manageable cost.

The other properties I have been consolidating in Reclaim Cloud are the various ds106 sites. Namely ds106.us, the WordPress multisite that was a beast on shared hosting, but purrs like a kitten on Reclaim Cloud. Then there is the mighty ds106radio running on Azuracast in the cloud; the newly christened Mastodon server social.ds106.us; the old gold tilde space ds106.club; and finally the listen.ds106rad.io Apache server I just spun up last month to move it off cPanel. There is also the old ds106.tv environment running an Ant Media server I just shut down. That has been replaced with the ds106.tv server running on PeerTube, and I’m not deleting it until I know everything is synced to the new instance. So, let’s do the math on the monthly costs to host the ds106 empire:

ds106.us $34.82 (This is an active WordPress Multisite with years of archives, the daily create, assignment bank and much more)
ds106radio $50.54 (Instance of Azuracast running ds106radio)
ds106social $57.98 (Mastodon instance running social.ds106.us)
ds106.club $5.72 (Fun old school tilde server that’s still running purely for the joy it brings me)
ds106.tv $34.68 (The old Ant Media server we are running, the new Peertube instance is running at $12 per month)
listen2ds106radio $5.71 (an apache server I am testing to run archived HTML sites from)

And that’s the ds106 breakdown at a subtotal of $189.45 per month. You’ll notice that Mastodon and Azuracast are the most expensive environments, but once I retire the Ant Media Server, the cost could go down another $15-$20 monthly. But I might actually increase costs for ds106.us given I want to see if a multiregion setup works for that WordPress setup. Would love to get it running through Cloudflare and have failover, CDN action and DDoS protection, not to mention image compression on the fly. We’ll see, enough folks still use that server that I do not want to get cavalier with it, but it would be nice to treat ds106.us as mission critical infrastructure, even if it’s not in the eyes of many

So, with $159.61 for the bavaproperties and $189.45 per month for ds106, where is the unaccounted $50? That would be a couple of personal projects outside bavatuesdays I am playing with, namely No Copyright Intended which is a Peertube instance with all my archived VHS tapes, that runs $28.18 per month. Then there is Antonella’s Ghost blog that runs $14.34 per month, and finally a couple of sites I use to track my domains so I remember to renew the growing horde of online addresses I’m regularly accumulating (that’s another post). And with that you have just about $400 per month, sounds crazy, but then think about all the sites it is powering, and how damn well they work

The other cost, besides domains, is running the DNS for these sites through Cloudflare. I have the Cloudflare Pro Plan at $20 per month (mainly for bavatuesdays, the other domains are free) and I pay an additional $5.00 per month for the Argo smart routing of traffic for the bava. On top of that I pay another $8.80 for the 80 GB of accelerated traffic through Argo monthly (the first GB is free), which acts as a kind of speed boost. Finally, I pay another $15.50 for the load balancing feature through Cloudflare that I use to manage the bava multiregion setup. That breaks down to $5 for basic load balancing, another $10 for geo-routing traffic to the closest server, and $0.50 for DNS queries beyond the initial 500,000. Is it overkill? Definitely. Am I learning a ton about how amazing Cloudflare is and what it enables for sites that need to be constantly online? Absolutely.

So, at the end of the day, excluding domains, I am paying just about $450 for hosting my various bavatuesdays sites and all the ds106 instances. To be clear, I can be so extravagant with these resources cause I help run a hosting service—that fact is not lost on me. At the same time it is helping me put costs in the cloud in some perspective in an attempt to understand what the real costs of hosting your own data are, not to mention running larger community sites. I can afford to do this for ds106.us because it is Dr. Oblivion’s illegitimate love child, and bava is my bread and butter, but not everyone is in the same boat. But the more I put into the cloud the more I start to frame this exchange in terms of the cost of peace of mind and performance for the pain and suffering I went through when trying to run bavatuesdays and ds106.us on a shared server. Perhaps this whole post is more an argument for minimal computing than shedding the weight of the past, but that is not how I roll. I’m a web hoarder and I’m just gonna need to move to Cloud City!

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I have to document some of what we have been working on for WordPress Multiregion (WPMR) given I’ll need to reference some of these commands and scripts in the future. One of the issues that can occur with our WPMR setups is that the database on the primary site can get out of sync with the secondary site, which means posts or comments to the primary database are not copied over cleanly to the secondary database. This is an issue for obvious reasons, but it can be hard to identify given both sites will still be running cleanly (the database does not break), it’s just that the secondary site will not have any of the latest content after the sync was broken.

This is an issue I have run into sporadically while playing with WPMR, and over the last month we have come up with a clean way to both identify when the databases aren’t replicating cleanly as well as a command to run that puts them back in sync.

Excerpt from script to identify with WordPress Multiregion instances are out of sync

The first bit I’ll share is a script Chris Blankenship wrote that is executed regularly using a cron job to ensure the JSON output from each WordPress instance of a WPMR setup match for latest posts or comments (and we may even want to add pages to that).

```

entry functiondef mainsigninfor this_host in $target_dictionary.keysdiagnostic_output = run_diagnostic($target_dictionary[this_host])if (diagnostic_output['result'] != "0") and (diagnostic_output['result'] != 0)$list_to_email.push(this_host)endendsend_emailsignoutendmain

`` This lives on Reclaim’s Ansible server at/root/cron_scripts/multiregion_db_replication/multiregion_db_replication_check-bava.rb` and if I add my Reclaim Cloud username and password as well as our Jelastic API key I will be notified both via email whenever the two databases are out of sync. You can also integrate with Slack notifications, but I changed those emails given they’re particular to Reclaim Hosting’s Slack, much like the Reclaim Cloud credentials, Jelastic API key, etc.

So, now that we know when the sync is not working we need to fix it. And do that you need to run the following command on the secondary WordPress instance as root for the environment. To switch to root you need this command:

sudo su -root

After that, run the database recovery command below in screen given it can take 15-20 minutes:

screen

Once in screen, make sure the donor-ip value is the IP address of the primary WordPress instance in the multiregion setup. and then run the database recovery script:

/tmp/db-recovery.sh --donor-ip 'primary.wpmr.ip.address' --scenario restore_primary_from_primary

For example, the command for my setup looks like this:

/tmp/db-recovery.sh --donor-ip '198.244.162.213' --scenario restore_primary_from_primary

After that, the script will re-sync the databases.

What follows might be considered a wishlist. What would make sense based on this workflow is that any time the sync breaks the following three things happen:

The Cloudflare load balancer is immediately switched from dynamic or geo-targeted steering of traffic to failover mode. This means that the traffic for the secondary server will automatically redirect all traffic to the primary environment until the two databases are re-synced.
The database recovery script is immediately run once the out-of-sync notification is received.
After the database recovery is finished and the script no longer shows the two databases out of sync the Cloudflare load balancer is told to resume dynamic or geo-targeted traffic steering

And with that the multi-region setup would not always need to route pools in failover order, this will happen only if there is an issue with database syncing, or any of the server instances goes down.

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Following-up on yesterday’s post about our Owncast session for the Open Media Ecosystem series, I wanted to quickly highlight that we now have a 1-click installer for Owncast in Reclaim Cloud. I tried it out yesterday, and it is yet another slick installer from Taylor Jadin, he is en fuego!

First things first, what is Owncast? It’s free and open source live streaming software that integrates cleanly with production tools like Open Broadcaster Software to stream video to the web. [NB: Reclaim Edtech will host a three session flex course on OBS in the second half of January.] Owncast frames itself as an open source alternative to tools like Twitch, and with more social integrations (including the fediverse) it may be a nice fit for announcing streams across your social spaces. Keep in mind it’s first and foremost a streaming tool, no recording video, no production suite, or anything like that—live streaming and live chat is all. Much of its strength lies in its laser focus on streaming and a simple, elegant interface.

In terms of the installation on Reclaim Cloud, it is really quite simple, as a 1-click installer should be. You search for Owncast in the Marketplace:

Search for Owncast in the Reclaim Cloud Marketplace

After that you select to install Owncast and you will see a dialog box asking for the Environment name, display name, and region for installation:

Owncast installer dialog box

Once you fill this out and click “Install” the app will start installing.

The Package is being installed please wait dialog box

After about a minute Owncast will be installed and you will get an email with the environment IP address for pointing an A record to if you want a custom domain like cast.bava.tv. The email will also have the default username and password for Owncast, which is admin and abc123 respectively.

Owncast email you receive after installation

Needless to say you should change your password once you logic, and it just so happens it is the same as your secret stream key, which I find convenient. Also, you will notice the email says that if you what a custom domain domain and A record to the listed IP address, what’s more, there is an Add-on in the environment that allows you to add the custom domain and once you do it will automatically issue an SSL certificate, which is very slick!

Owncast domain configuration Add-on

And the next step is super clear, enter the domain name and click change:

Owncast Domain configuration Add-on for changing the domain

The other piece which is quite nice is an Add-on for updating the environment to the latest version, which saves folks a lot of futzing in Docker, which can be a bear if its new to you:

Update Owncast Add-on

And with that you have the entire installation, and it was so fast for me I almost thought I did something wrong

In terms of managing Owncast, that is quite simple, you login with admin and abc123 at yourowncastinstall.com/admin URL and the dashboard will have the RTMP and Stream key front and center.

Owncast dashboard with the RTMP and Stream key front and center

The stream key is also your password for logging in, so I recommend changing that immediately at Configuration–>Server Setup:

Change your stream key/password in the Configuration–>Server Setup window

After that plug your streaming URL and stream key into your OBS software stream settings and you are ready to stream live to the web. There are other features like web hooks for integrating with social sites, live chat that just works, and streaming from S3 buckets, so get in there and play around.

What’s cool about this installer is now we have working 1-click installers for every application we are featuring in the Open Media Ecosystem series: Azuracast, Jitsi, Owncast, and PeerTube. That is pretty awesome, and I think I heard/saw something about a 1-click installer for Mastodon as well, WHAT?!

I spy with my little eye a 1-click Mastodon installer in Reclaim Cloud

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In another installation of the Open Media Ecosystem series run through Reclaim Edtech, Pilot Irwin and I did a stream last week highlighting the virtues of Owncast, a free, open source application for live streaming video. We used the Who, What, When, Where, How and Why approach to providing an overview of Owncast, just like Azuracast, and the verdict was there’s much to love about a small, open tool with a singleness of purpose. Owncast aims to provide a free alternative to Twitch for streaming, and that it does very well. And with momentum around the fediverse growing it may provide a good alternative for live streaming to a distributed community, potentially making monolithic tools like Twitch with restrictive copyright that much less appealing. What’s I love about Owncast is it’s simple interface and straightforward approach to live streaming, but if you watch the short overview session below you’ll hear Pilot and I say as much a lot.

The other cool thing worth noting here is that during this stream Pilot and I mention the possibility of a 1-click installer for Owncast in Reclaim Cloud, and soon after that Taylor Jadin went ahead and created it. So good!

I’ll have a separate post about the Owncast installer on Reclaim Cloud here shortly given I just tested it out, but if you are looking for an elegant and easy tool for live streaming to the web—no recordings, no media production, just streaming—then look no further, Owncast fits the bill quite nicely.

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Today I did a quick stream attempting to get WriteFreely working on Reclaim Cloud. WriteFreely is an interesting tool that I wanted to play with, and I was able to get things working with some poking around and help from Tim who was watching and pointed out a bind setting in the config.ini file. More on that below. Things kick off at around 2:51.

Basically, I followed the instructions on their install page with a few additions and caveats. I started with making a new environment in Reclaim Cloud with an Ubuntu 22.04 VPS as the application container.

I first made a folder inside /var/www to work from, then downloaded the latest release from github, extracted the tar.gz file and ran the configurator:

wget https://github.com/writefreely/writefreely/releases/download/v0.13.2/writefreely_0.13.2_linux_amd64.tar.gztar -xvf writefreely_0.13.2_linux_amd64.tar.gz./writefreely config start When going through the configurator thing I had it set up a “production - standalone” instance, using sqlite, with “insecure - port 80” for the https settings. I also set the public url to the Reclaim Cloud environment url: http://writefreely.uk.reclaim.cloud

Then I ran the command to generate the keys it needed:

./writefreely keys generate Then I had to edit the config.ini file to set it to listen on all network interfaces by changing the line that starts with bind:

bind = 0.0.0.0 That took a while to figure out, as until I changed that, WriteFreely wasn’t publiclly accessible.

Then I used the instructions on the page to make a service for Ubuntu 15.04 or later. Mine looked like this:

[Unit]Description=WriteFreely InstanceAfter=syslog.target network.target# If MySQL is running on the same machine, uncomment the following # line to use it, instead. #After=syslog.target network.target mysql.service[Service]Type=simpleStandardOutput=syslogStandardError=syslogWorkingDirectory=/var/www/writefreely.uk.reclaim.cloud/writefreelyExecStart=/var/www/writefreely.uk.reclaim.cloud/writefreely/writefreelyRestart=always[Install]WantedBy=multi-user.target Finally, I started the service:

systemctl start writefreely Once that worked, I added an nginx load balancer, and turned on Auto SSL to get things loading over HTTPS!

Overall, it was a success, except I wasn’t able to get the federation features working properly. I suspect this is because I was using the shared load balancer on reclaim cloud instead of a dedicated IP. I will also likely need to play with the nginx config. More on that later, hopefully!

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Earlier this month I did a session for Reclaim Edtech’s Open Media Ecosystem series on the open source web radio software Azuracast. I also posted about Azuracast’s web hooks that sent notifications to both Twitter and Mastodon when a live broadcast is happening. It’s been an open source media software kinda month for us at Reclaim, so the bava abides.

On the way to documenting changes made to listen.ds106rad.io, I ending up thinking more broadly about how my approach to hosting personal sites has undergone a major shift. I no longer default to cPanel, rather I am pretty much cloud-first all the way!

The listen.ds106rad.io site now hosted on a micro-Apache server on Reclaim Cloud

Until two weeks ago the domain listen.ds106rad.io was pointing to a catch-all cPanel account, and I setup a subdomain for listen.ds106rad.io which hosted the HTML file with the embedded player and an image or two. As I continue to push as many applications from cPanel into Reclaim Cloud as possible,* I wanted to see how easy it would be to spin up an Apache server environment hosting the webpage. It’s probably overkill, but at 1 cloudlet (128MB RAM and 400MHz CPU) it’s also not too crazy.†

The listen2ds106radio apache server in Reclaim Cloud

The process was as easy as installing an Apache container, adding the HTML file and images to /var/www/webroot/ROOT opening up port 80 and 443 in the environment firewall and finally getting an SSL certificate (no load balancer necessary). And it worked cleanly, I want to see if I can start playing with virtualhost configuration to figure out how Apache servers manage mapping domains, but this is pretty awesome. It is the early stages of a server to host all my archived HTML sites over the years (there are many now), and if I am trying to go cPanel-less this year so figuring this out will be crucial.

Once I move a site/app into Reclaim Cloud I often find it easier to run DNS through Cloudflare rather than cPanel. I do this not only because I love the Cloudflare interface, but also because it provides everything from proxied SSL certificates to DDoS protection to load balancing to object storage to a global CDN and that’s just a few of the features.‡ In fact, the migration to the Cloud over the last two years has helped me understand that Cloudflare could stand-in for large swathes of what cPanel does currently.

Cloudflare’s DNS interface is so beautiful!

In fact, take the case of ds106radio. The main application Azuracast is hosted in a Docker container on Reclaim Cloud; the DNS runs through Cloudflare; the transactional email through Mailgun, and we’re currently setting up S3 storage for hosting backups and recordings of live broadcasts. The more I play in Reclaim Cloud, the more I begin to understand how the future of Reclaim Hosting could look. While long overdue for my slow brain, it’s still exciting to start finally seeing the outlines of the future.

Reclaim Cloud Add-ons can be thought of as packages of functionality from cPanel on an app-by-app basis

The various pieces, i.e.server (Reclaim Cloud), DNS (Cloudflare), email (Mailgun), and storage (S3), are currently distributed across various services given each does their own bit best—what’s more rather than the kitchen sink approach of cPanel, you can have addons for specific features that you can choose to activate (and pay for) on any givenenvironment as needed. So also should have the ability to manage email, DNS, or storage settings as Addons for any given server environment in Reclaim Cloud, and then go one step further and integrate them to make it possible to select which tool you will use for DNS management, storage, transactional email, etc. (this could also be cPanel, but no longer assumed and defaulted to).

So, for example, you want to install Azuracast on Reclaim Cloud, and then manage the DNS through a Cloudflare addon. After that you can setup email through a Mailgun addon, and then choose whatever S3 provider you use to integrate storage—that’s another addon. All of these pieces are managed using Addons, and keeping them linked to a specific environment helps you remember what service you used for which server/application.

I think a hosting company at this moment—not unlike an edtech—needs to be thinking through how to integrate the best of breed cloud tools into a simple, elegant interface using APIs that will essentially stitch together a next-generation hosting interface. And for the next-gen apps this goes beyond just a one-click installer for the application, it also has to make sure DNS, email, and storage all work. And this is where the one-click Ghost installer Taylor Jadin built really helped me see it all in one place tied to the Reclaim Cloud environment. It is a blueprint for making these traditionally difficult-to-install next-gen Cloud apps far more accessible, and the addons at the environment level is where you can naturally integrate all the other pieces traditionally offloaded to cPanel, DNS, Email, version updates, and storage quotas to name just a few.

Addons for a Ghost 1-click isntaller in Reclaim Cloud that helps you manage Mailgun, DOmain configuration, and an easy container update.

We have talked about this at length with the idea of Domains 2.0 and trying to abstract out the hosting process to try and understand what people need rather than defaulting to registering a domain and then immediately driving folks into cPanel. What if the interface was more contextual (tied together by APIs from other services) that can communicate with your DNS records, have bucket keys for storing files, and see what mail records exist for a given domain. I understand that what I am saying here and what Taylor has done for Ghost is not the same thing, but for me it represents a path forward to explore what Domains 2.0 might look like if Reclaim Cloud were the default, not cPanel.

I think the other piece worth discussing at length, and I will save it for my next post, is how this shift to the cloud effects hosting costs. It has been my experience that this approach can get expensive quickly, but the other side of that is that process becomes that much better and what’s possible that much greater that it seems worth it, at least for me given my day job.

White board with the early blueprint for a container-driven Domains API

All of which reminds me of when Tim and I met Kin and Audrey at Emory University in 2014 or so. We were chatting at the hotel, and Kin recounted his early server admin days when he discovered AWS (and soon after understood the power of the API) and the hook was that it is scalable infrastructure that you would only pay for what you use. But as he noted, it was so flexible and so much was possible in terms of replication, increased uptime, and generally tinkering with how the next generation of server infrastructure works that it ended up costing more, but everyone was happy because there was no downtime, while more and more infrastructure could be automated and managed remotely. In 2014 I was just trying to wrap my head around something Kin had been working on for years, and as always he was graceful and generous with everything he knew. In fact, later that year Tim and I asked Kin to help us map out the long road towards a container-driven hosting service managed using APIs, and I think that vision is aging well, and with Reclaim Cloud as robust as ever I know one thing I’ll be thinking a lot about in 2023: defaulting to the Cloud!

_______________________________________

It’s been two years since I moved the bava.blog and the main ds106.us sites to Reclaim Cloud, and the experience has been great in terms of performance and management.

† Especially once I figure out how to automate virtual hosts so I can map domains and host numerous flat HTML sites from this one server, or basically reproduce the tilde space approach for my archived sites.

‡In many ways Cloudflare represents various pieces of the hosting panel for the next-generation of web applications, and it would be smart to figure out how to integrate, rather than try and reproduce, their features through Reclaim Cloud. An integration between Virtuozzo and Cloudflare for Reclaim Cloud driven by a series of API calls that would allow folks to use it seamlessly with Reclaim Cloud would be a worthy goal. I have much more to say about Cloudflare in the coming posts and beyond, but suffice it to say in this long footnote that there will be a day as soon as next year where all my web properties will be hosted in Reclaim Cloud with the DNS managed in Cloudflare and the email running through Mailgun.

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Today I did a stream where I attempted to create an Owncast installer live in about an hour. I have used Owncast before, and used Jim’s blog post to set it up manually, but that’s mostly all the prep I had done beforehand. Having just come off of setting up a Mastodon installer, greatly helped as I learned a lot from that experience, and was able to re-use a lot of stuff from it.

I ended up kind of flying through everything, as I felt like the clock was ticking, so it may not be the best explainer, but if are curious how to run things in docker-compose and how our Reclaim Cloud installers work, you may find it an interesting watch, or skim.

If you want to check out the actual files for the installer, you can find those here:

TaylorJadin/owncast-installer

Oh, and that installer is live in the marketplace now! I did end up including add-ons to make updating and domain configuration 1-click, like our Ghost installer. I didn’t end up streaming the part where I made the add-ons, but that basically amounted to me borrowing some stuff from my Ghost installer. Go check it out if you want to try out a self-hostable live video server!

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I’ve been busy with Peertube stuff lately. After getting my own instance at video.jadin.me upgraded to 5.0, I also wanted to set up object storage so I could utilize Amazon S3 or the alternatives. In this case I wanted to use Backblaze B2, as I’m already using Backblaze’s Personal backup for backing up computers in my home, and generally a fan of the simplicity of B2 compared to doing stuff in the AWS dashboard. Plus, it’s so much cheaper!

The Backblaze partThe first thing to do was to get a B2 bucket set up. I’m not going to go into much detail, as this is relatively simple once you have a Backblaze account. I named my bucket “video-jadin-me”.

Once the bucket was made, I went to the App Keys section to generate credentials for Peertube to use, then made note of them for later.

I also went to Bucket Settings to make sure uploaded files were publicly accessible (they’ll still be behind long obscure URLs though). I’m pretty sure that with Peertube 5.0 this is actually not necessary as Peertube will not proxy the video traffic, meaning that I could actually keep this set to private, but URL obscurity is more than good enough for my use case here.

Next, I went to CORS Rules and set Share everything in this bucket with every origin. This is necessary for Peertube to be able to play the actual video files, but if I was concerned about this security more, I could have likely locked it down to the Share everything in this bucket with this one origin and then entered video.jadin.me. Who knows, maybe I’ll revisit this and the public/private settings later on now that I know it all works.

Finally, I also adjusted the Lifecycle Settings to keep 30 days worth of backup copies of files, in case I ever deleted something on accident. This is slick because of the way that B2 (and other S3 compatible storage works) it only keeps changed or deleted files for 30 days, not a separate backup of everything, saving you space and therefore money!

It’s awesome that all of this was easy to do, without even having to resort to documentation. Also, I didn’t have to jump to like 36 sections of the Dashboard, nor write any JSON for configuration. Take that, AWS!

The Peertube partFiguring out how to set it up on Peertube took some experimentation. It’s half documented here:

Remote storage (S3) - docs.joinpeertube.org1

Reading that then checking out the production.yaml.example file in Github gave me a clue.

After trying a few different things, I finally got it working. Here’s the object_storage section of my Peertube’s production.yaml, which is located at /root/docker-compose/config/production.yaml

object_storage: enabled: true endpoint: 's3.us-west-002.backblazeb2.com' upload_acl: public: 'public-read' private: 'private' videos: bucket_name: 'video-jadin-me' prefix: 'videos/' streaming_playlists: bucket_name: 'video-jadin-me' prefix: 'streaming-playlists/' credentials: access_key_id: 'keyID from Backblaze' secret_access_key: 'applicationKey from Backblaze' You’ll want to fill in the fill in the access_key_id and secret_access_key fields, as well as endpoint and bucket_name to match with your B2 bucket.

Then I restarted Peertube for good measure2, and uploaded a tiny test video! Once it uploaded and transcoded, I checked my Backblaze account to see that the file wound up in the right place.

Moving existing videos to B2I checked out the Peertube docs again to see how I could move existing videos into B2. I ended using the commands verbatim. First I moved a few files, one at a time:

docker-compose exec -u peertube peertube npm run create-move-video-storage-job -- --to-object-storage -v [videoUUID] Note that the videoUUID is not just the last part of the URL on the watch page, like on YouTube. Personally, I like to find a video’s UUID by going to the stats page for the video and looking at the URL there, but there may be better ways.

Once I did a few and they seemed to work, I ran the command to move all of the videos to B2:

docker-compose exec -u peertube peertube npm run create-move-video-storage-job -- --to-object-storage --all-videos I used iftop to watch the traffic out to Backblaze as there isn’t really a good progress indicator anywhere else:

You can also see the Jobs get created in the Peertube web interface by going to Administration > System > Jobs

Now I’m all set with just shy of 200GB of videos stored in Backblaze!

It’s cool to see they use Docsify for their documentation! I’m a big fan of Docsify after using it for a project recently. ︎
docker-compose down && docker-compose up -d ︎

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Here are some notes I made on how I upgraded various Peertube installs (video.jadin.me and archive.reclaim.tv, mainly) to version 5.0. Version 5 came with some big changes, and required some a new config for nginx, as well as a required setting in a new to me production.yaml file. Here are some quick notes if you are having trouble upgrading to version 5, and you are using a docker-compose based setup. There were some notes in the GitHub release for this new version that informed my notes below, but it did take me a little figuring and experimentation to make sense of all of it.

Before getting started, check where your docker-compose file is for Peertube. Looking at the Peertube GitHub, you’ll see references to /var/www/peertube-docker but if you used our reclaim cloud installer your files are in /root. I’ll assume your Peertube’s docker-compose.yml is in /root in the following commands, but adjust as necessary.

First, we need to pull the new containers:

cd /rootdocker-compose pull Next, we need to use get the new config file for the nginx container from the Peertube GitHub.

cd /root/docker-volume/nginxrm peertubewget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/develop/support/nginx/peertube We also need to generate a secret, and put it in the production.yaml configuration file. I didn’t have one of these, so I made a blank one to start.

cd /root/docker-volume/configtouch production.yaml We’ll need to generate a key, which we can do from the command line with this command:

openssl rand -hex 32 Copy that somewhere, as we’ll need it in a second.

Next, we’ll edit our production.yaml file to include a new secret section. You’ll also want to paste in your key.

vim /root/docker-volume/config/production.yaml Mine now looks something like this:

secrets: # Generate one using `openssl rand -hex 32` peertube: 'your-generated-key-goes-between-these-quotes' We’ve got most of the hard stuff done. Now we need to restart Peertube:

cd /rootdocker-compose down -vdocker-compose up -d If Peertube doesn’t come back up properly, tail the logs:

docker-compose logs -f Finally, when things are all set, we have to run a migration script as Peertube has changed where it stores private video files:

cd /rootdocker-compose exec -u peertube peertube node dist/scripts/migrations/peertube-5.0.js

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Reclaim Open Art

I don’t think I have posted yet about Reclaim Open, so let me fix that now and forever! Reclaim Hosting‘s 4th bi-annual conference will take place next year on June 5th, 6th, and 7th in Fredericksburg, VA. As luck and planning would have it, the event coincides with our 10th anniversary as a company, so we decided to go back to where it all started: UMW! To make the deal that much sweeter, there will also be an anniversary/birthday bash at Reclaim Arcade to celebrate this momentous occasion.

But if you are still not convinced to make the journey, my final plea will be to join us not only for a 3-day event (1 for the un-conference, two for the show, three for the celebration let’s go, go, go), but also be part of a micro-history in the making as we’ll be coordinating a DIY documentary to try and capture the past/present/future of the open web as lived and witnessed by many of the folks on the ground. For example, it would be a lot of fun to bring together a panel of folks from UMW’s Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies (DTLT) during the Web 2.0 years to help anchor that moment of the web and acknowledge its importance for the very existence of Reclaim Hosting, right?

Andy Rush may or may not be involved

I’m absolutely thrilled for this, not only is it akin to a homecoming, but the prospect of re-connecting with so many amazing people that we’ve collaborated with over the years is truly exciting. In the new year we t will also begin announcing three brilliant keynotes speakers, each of whom will be focusing on one of the three temporal conditions of our event, namely past, present, and future of the open web. It’s going to be an event for the ages, even accounting for my bias. If you have attended any of our previous events you know there is a there there, and we will bring our A-game x10 because this represents the culmination of a decade of Reclaiming. And if the Fediverse is any indicator, we’re all just getting started on yet another reclaiming journey, if I may be so bold, sir. I hope to see you there, and you can read more about it and submit a session through our absolutely stunning conference website–the combination of a Lauren Hanks design with Bryan Mathers art is formidable!

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WordPress Back-up Addon Interface

I recently wrote up a support guide that outlines how to backup a WordPress environment in Reclaim Cloud. We already take regular nightly backups of all environments that are kept for 14 days, but those can only be restored upon request.

Reclaim Cloud backup server setup dialogue box

With this approach you can manage backups based on your specific needs. Whether it’s hourly, weekly (or even a specific day of the week), monthly, etc., it is all possible. Add to that on-demand backups if, for example, you need to test something in the moment and want a quick and easy method to restore if things go south. And there is no two-week limit as with the automatic backups, you can control how long they stay around. This tool comes is really useful for folks who want to manage their own backups, and the additional insurance is never a bad thing.

Reclaim Cloud WordPress backup server options

Having working backups has been one of the essential elements of keeping Reclaim Hosting running as smoothly as it does. And while not always the sexiest topic, I always feel better knowing they’re around. We can also use Jetbackup in Reclaim Cloud environments for an additional licensing and storage cost which also allows for on-demand backups, what’s more they would happen in a completely different data center to ensure even further redundancy. That would be a nice addition to the current feature in Reclaim Cloud, allowing folks to backup and restore from (and possibly to) a different region in the unlikely event the entire data center is offline. This does overlap a bit with some of the WordPress multiregion hosting we have been doing at Reclaim Hosting this year, and while we can setup region-by-region backup servers for a multi-region environments, they’re still tied to the region the instance lives it—to have these backup environments be region-agnostic across our cloud servers would be pretty badass.

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Welcome to Running a Newsletter with Ghost! As we hit the last day of November I wanted to quickly compile the Reclaim Edtech sessions we did this month focused on getting up and running with Ghost, an open source platform … Continue reading →

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It was only a matter of time at the pace I’ve been going with setting up Mastodon instances that Reclaim Hosting would get its own snazzy server, and that day was Wednesday. I streamed the setup so that I would … Continue reading →

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We wanted to send out a friendly reminder that Reclaim Hosting is continuing to move towards this updated process for maintaining custom application installers in cPanel environments (announced at the … Continue reading "Friendly Reminder about Custom Installers"

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The following video guide shows you how to install Mastodon on a Reclaim Cloud virtual private server (VPS). This guide assumes you have your VPS spun up in Reclaim Cloud, a domain for your server chosen, a transactional email account … Continue reading →

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The following video tutorial takes you through the process of preparing to install Mastodon on a virtual private server (VPS) in Reclaim Cloud. I’ve installed a few servers now, and based on that experience it makes sense to break things … Continue reading →

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A wonderful symptom of launching Instructional Technology at Reclaim Hosting has been the rediscovery, for me at least, of all the avenues to join in alongside others and “reclaim” slices of the web. It has been such a joy to be a part of this community, and to watch it transform and grow through the… Read More »Reclaim Community

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I just posted about the Ghost Flex Course currently running at Reclaim Edtech this month, and it occurred to me that is just one of two! Lauren Hanks and Maren Deepwell are deep into week three of their four-week session … Continue reading →

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This week saw the release of the second installment of the Ghost Flex Course we’re running at Reclaim Edtech. This session featured Pilot Irwin taking us through their process of putting together Reclaim Hosting’s monthly newsletter Reclaim Roundup. There is … Continue reading →

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Rhyming post titles will cost you extra! 🙂 Roger that. I might be interested in experimenting, if I get can get some scaffolding. — Derek Bruff (@derekbruff) November 6, 2022 I got sucked down an elephant-sized rabbit hole the last … Continue reading →

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Last week Lauren Hanks, Chris Blankenship, and I recorded a session for Reclaim Today, “Oh What Brave New Worlds of WordPress Multiregion Hosting!” wherein we discuss the process of getting Reclaim Hosting’s main site running in in a WordPress mutliregion … Continue reading →

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Hey there, Domain of One’s Own Admins! In case you missed the announcement in the October Roundup Newsletter, our infrastructure team is excited to begin regular, scheduled updates to core … Continue reading "Regular, scheduled updates to DoOO Homepages to begin on 11/20"

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This month at Reclaim Edtech Pilot, Taylor and I will be running a flex course focused on getting up and running with the open source publishing tool Ghost. It will take place every Wednesday over the next three weeks at … Continue reading →

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I feel like I could write a book about just last week at Reclaim Hosting, so many awesome things happening and the work we’re doing to build a sense of team internally and community more generally is really starting to … Continue reading →

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It’s been more than a decade since Grant Potter introduced me to wonders of self-hosted web radio, yet another lasting legacy of that heady ds106 trip. During the pandemic the radio represented an occasion to return to re-discovering micro-communities. For … Continue reading →

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Two weeks ago, I did a stream on HTML flattening with a tool called HTTrack. I’ve been wanting to show this off for a while as I think it makes the processing of flattening a site relatively easy, plus it works across macOS, Linux, and Windows. I’ve been a little behind on blogging this one, as I didn’t have the video available on video.jadin.me until recently. This video was my test case for setting up my Peertube instance to store its videos on Backblaze B2, which is a lot like Amazon’s S3 storage, but even cheaper for many use cases.

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Since our all-team meeting in November of last year I have been chasing the white whale of WordPress multiregion hosting on Reclaim Cloud. I’ve been experimenting with it off the side of my desk on and off since January. You … Continue reading →

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In preparation for the start of next week's Flex Course on Hacks for Hybrid Working, I thought I would build on a few previous blog posts by compiling my favorite tips and tricks for working from home. I have worked remotely or in a hybrid environment for many years now, and in that time, have developed a set of strategies that help me delineate between my work and home life, stay organized, prevent burnout, and encourage connection.

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This is a collection of tips & tricks that was compiled over the summer when the Reclaim team met internally to talk about time management & work prioritization. I wanted to add it to this space too, mostly for personal reference.

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This post is heavily influenced by the goings-on at Reclaim Edtech this October, namely a month-long dive into all things WordPress Multisite for admins with Tom Woodward. It’s similar to the Domain of One’s Own workshop we have run for … Continue reading →

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After every new Reclaim Roundup monthly newsletter I usually do three things: 1) read it, 2) remark on how awesome it is, and 3) tell myself I need to blog about it! I regularly do the first two of those … Continue reading →

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This week I did a stream to document how I use hugo, the static site generator, for this blog that you’re reading right now! The point of this post and stream were to show how I use this tool, but all of this is really not a good starting point if you are looking to start with hugo, or you just want to see how it works. For that, I’d recommend checking out the hugo quick start documentation!

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I recently needed to back up a bunch of files, about 6GB, from a Reclaim Cloud node so here are some notes on how I was able to connect directly to the Node. I like using the Reclaim Cloud SSH Gate for SSH or SFTP access to containers most of the time, but in my case because I had so many files to sync, I wanted to use rsync, which as far as I’m aware won’t work with the SSH Gate.

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Early last week Ed Beck asked if I would be willing to talk with him (and by extension his class) about some advantages (and limits) of open source applications in education. I think Ed has been following my recent championing … Continue reading →

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I'm delighted to be joining Dr. Maren Deepwell in just a few short weeks to host Reclaim Hosting's newest flex course, Hacks for Hybrid Working. We'll be meeting over the course of 4 weeks beginning late October through November to unpack hybrid working and all that it entails. I'm really looking forward to diving further into personal working habits that take shape in virtual/hybrid settings, evaluating our relationships with digital tools, and building out a Hybrid Working Roadmap.

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Lauren Hanks has been working on a really cool space that will highlight the various channels through which we are building community at Reclaim Hosting. It’s still under construction, but I’m sure Lauren will share the magic, as well as … Continue reading →

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As of September 22, 2022, Reclaim Hosting is temporarily disabling the ability to install new Scalar sites in cPanel via Installatron. Our team was recently made aware of a possible … Continue reading "Temporarily Disabling New Scalar Installs"

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As separate entities, Domain of One’s Own (DoOO) and WordPress Multisite (WPMS) are not new ideas. What’s more, we’ve known for quite a while now that they’re not in competition with each other at all; DoOO & WPMS serve different user groups with different needs. For many years, when taking meetings with prospective schools, the… Read More »A New Model for Domains: DoOO & WPMS

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After the most recent Reclaim Community Chat on Full Site Editing in WordPress, I decided it was time to explore the Site Editor for myself. To experiment, I used my sandbox site (sandbox.laurenhanks.com) and installed one of the simplest themes I could find, Zoologist. I realized later that this is a child theme of Blockbase.… Read More »Exploring the WP Site Editor

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In addition to the stream on a new Ghost installer, Jim and I showcased the streaming tools we used to put together the Reclaim EdTech Understanding Containers flex course as well as discussed the format of the course and future offerings for Reclaim EdTech. And here are the chapters if you want to skip around the video: 0:00 - Intro 3:50 - OBS demo 7:09 - vdo.ninja demo 17:08 - reclaimed.

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Today Jim and I did a stream showcasing a new Ghost installer for Reclaim Cloud that should automate a lot of common setup tasks that people run into when using Ghost. I’m really proud of this installer because I’ve put a bunch of time into making this thing really simple to use for folks who don’t have experience with Docker or Reclaim Cloud, but just want to get Ghost up and running quickly.

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I skipped session 3 in order to attend the live version of session 4, so I'll need to double back soon to what I've missed. In today's unit we explored different Docker containers like HedgeDoc, Baserow, and WBO. Through these exercises, we learned about updating containers, working with Bind Mounts, and cloning from a github repository instead of manually creating a docker-compose file.

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This blog post covers quick notes from session 2 of Reclaim Hosting's EdTech Flex Course on understanding containers. This session covered installing NextCloud on Reclaim Cloud by looking at docker run vs. docker-compose commands. We also looked at quick docker commands to run from terminal & defined Volumes, Bind Mounts, and Variables.

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Happy 9th birthday to our dear @ReclaimHosting! ? — Lauren Hanks (@brumface) July 23, 2022 On Saturday Lauren Hanks reminded me that Reclaim Hosting celebrated its 9th birthday. I get confused on the official formation date, I oscillate between the … Continue reading →

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This post was originally published on Lauren’s Sandbox and covers quick notes from session 1 of Reclaim EdTech‘s July Flex Course on Understanding Containers. Quick Links Welcome to Understanding Containers Week 1: What are containers, and what is Docker? Video: What are containers and cloud hosting? Docker Glossary Video: Basics of Command Line Getting Started with Docker … Continue reading Quick Notes from Understanding Containers, Session 1

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Life at Reclaim has been busy these last few months. Consider this the first of a couple Summer “Check In” posts. You can also read previous summer reflection posts if you’d like! Performance Reviews → Self Evals One of my priorities as a leader is to make sure the team …

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A couple of weeks ago I did a quick stream (ok it wasn’t quick, it was almost 90 minutes) on the Basics of the Command Line. My goal was to start at the beginning, with navigating around files and folders and editing text, while picking up some tips and tricks along the way, as well show why the command line is still so useful and important. I spend a lot of time trying to drive home that you should definitely definitely use the tab key to autocomplete paths as it will make your life easier.

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This is a quick little post to document something I’ve found handy! A common way to issue a Let’s Encrypt cert and get things to load on Reclaim Cloud over HTTPS is to use an NGINX Load Balancer. Here’s an example environment, one I use to run Foundry Virtual Tabletop: The trick is some applications that you run won’t automatically redirect URLs with HTTP to HTTPS, so you have to manually type HTTPS in your address bar.

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Have I mentioned it’s container month at Reclaim Edtech recently? Well, it is and that means I’m playing with installing apps, or even re-visiting apps we’ve already gotten running, which is the case here. Tim Owens already documented the process … Continue reading →

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Just over two years ago I wrote about spinning up a work experiment called Reclaim Radio using Azuracast. We used it irregularly and eventually it died on the vine a bit, especially given I was so used to broadcasting through … Continue reading →

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It’s container month at Reclaim Edtech, so I’ve been pushing myself to revisit todo list items that might give me a reason to play with containers, and lo and behold I found another Ghost. This time it was a project … Continue reading →

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I have been moving some stuff around in my basement in preparation for the container (an actual 40′ shipping container, not a Docker one) to land on Italian shores from the US. It will be the first time in almost … Continue reading →

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Our focus at Reclaim Hosting throughout 2022 has been all about increased communication. And while I’ve mentioned this before on the bava, the Reclaim Roundup has in many ways been central to this push. It seems prosaic and not all … Continue reading →

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In response to security improvements, roadmap projects, and software announcements, the Reclaim Hosting infrastructure team would like to communicate the following timelines and coming changes through 2022: Updates to … Continue reading "Infrastructure Announcements through 2022"

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Starting January 1, 2023, Reclaim Hosting will be raising the cost of Domain of One’s Own (DoOO) contracts in an effort to implement additional security improvements and help buffer the … Continue reading "Price Changes for Domain of One’s Own"

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PeerTube 4.2 is out, and it has all kinds of features I’m excited about like in-place editing of videos, replays of recurring live streams (basically you can have a permanent Twitch-like URL where you can go live and then have a recording of that livestream automatically available afterward), latency settings for livestreams, and a bunch of other stuff. I wanted to get my PeerTube instance on Reclaim Cloud upgraded, which is a docker-compose setup with the Live Chat plugin enabled, so I stopped the containers, pulled changes, and started the containers again.

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This month, I’m participating in some professional development offered through Reclaim Hosting’s EdTech Subscription, where we’re diving into all the Gravity Forms offers. Last week, we met for the first time so I wanted to jot down some notes and set up some gorals for the next 3 weeks! First, I did have some experience […]

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I wanted to highlight a very cool tool I found (thanks to TikTok!). I am always running folks through processes, like renewing domains or transferring accounts, where the process would be the same each time you go through the scenario. I write documentation for these processes or writing within tickets. Any time I can Use […]

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As promised in my last post, I am writing a post about the tech specs as to how everything comes together on my desk. Working from home again meant I needed to come up with a dedicated space to work, and moving into a new space allowed Brandon and I to think through the perfect […]

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Consider this post to be my unofficial love letter to Asana. If that’s not your thing, feel free to skip along to something else. You’ve been warned. :) A lot of my role in operations boils down to evaluating workflows. (Communication pathways, task progress, scheduling, UI inefficiencies, project pipelines, team …

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Last week I had the pleasure of co-presenting with Maren Deepwell at the OER22 Conference about Building Connections with Virtual Teams. This session was actually an extension of a conversation Maren and I had on the radio about leading and working with teams virtually, so it was really fun to …

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It has been a pretty amazing start of 2022 at Reclaim Hosting, with the creation of an Instructional Technology group, the building of an edtech professional development community, and then all things Reclaim Cloud, there has been no shortage of … Continue reading →

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Over the years at Reclaim, my desk/workspace has seen several iterations. I’ve worked through CoWork, the dedicated Reclaim Hosting office, then shifted to work from home at the beginning of the pandemic and back to the Reclaim Office. Reclaim recently went “fully remote” (as if the pandemic made this transition easier), where we retired the […]

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At the end of the day today I streamed a little bit of me playing around with Kasm Worskpaces on Reclaim Cloud: The tool seems interesting and it has been on my list of things to look into for a little while. It’s basically a self-hostable Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS), like Citrix or Amazon Appstream, but for Linux Desktops and applications. Also, it has a free version! Under the hood it all runs on Docker, which is how I found out about it.

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A very, very, common thing that I find myself doing while working with web stuff is copying a long URL, but only needing the domain name part to paste into a terminal or elsewhere. It’s annoying to carefully select just part of the URL, and even more annoying to manually delete the parts I don’t need: Your browser does not support the video tag. I love automating and making little shortcuts to simplify repetitive tasks like this!

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Last week I had the pleasure of speaking with Brian Lamb about Open Ed Tech in general and where Reclaim Hosting fits into the picture. Brian is working alongside Anne-Marie Scott to develop an open course for KPU’s Professional Program in Open Education. The course they are building is called …

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Last Monday, I got to sit down with Pilot, Taylor, and Jim to talk more in depth about our goals and ideas for Instructional Tech at Reclaim. This is such an exciting moment for us to think about what’s possible and how this professional development and community space may expand …

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Last week, Reclaim Hosting reached a big milestone: launching a new Instructional Technology service. Our team has been working on this for months, and you can read my some of my thoughts on what it has meant to embed Instructional Tech into the fabric of Reclaim here. For today’s post, …

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I use SSH to access different environment in Reclaim Cloud a lot, but one thing that I like to do is use a native terminal app (I use iTerm2 on macOS) instead of the Web SSH functionality built in to Jelastic. Web SSH is amazingly convenient, but web-based terminals like this frequently lack some of the features I am used to using in desktop-based terminals like customizable keyboard shortcuts, organization features like tabs and panes1, etc.

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Domains are honestly some of the coolest pieces of the web that I’ve worked with over the years. There are so many combinations to them. You can work with whatever you want on the beginning (like mine for example, meredithfierro.com) and there are a wide variety of domain extensions as well! Most folks know .com .net .edu .gov .org for example but did you know you can have extensions like .media .photography, even .yachts!

I even found some that I didn’t know existed looking through GoDaddy’s list of extensions (although I would recommend referencing the IANA list through data.iana.org instead) and even Wikipedia has an extensive curated list.

I’d like this post to be some running notes on what I’ve found are weird/procedural with domain names over my last 5 years in web hosting. There are a lot of specifics out there!

Domain Name Regulations ICANN and Domain Hierarchy First, domain names can fall under a lot of regulations. They’re overseen by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). This group oversees and regulates all domain registrations. They impose options like the 60-day domain lock for all newly registered/transferred domains, domains to be verified within 15 days of registration, and verify any contact information changes via email. I definitely recommend checking out their website to get a look at how domain names work and their plans. I used this several times while I was just starting out in the wide world of web hosting.

So ICANN oversees all different types of domain names right? So it just goes through one company? Not usually, there are so many different domain operators out there! These are different companies that are responsible for the extensions, so for example, .com, .net, and .name are all owned by a company called Verisign.

Each Operator offers different domain extensions to Registrars, which is the next step in the domain hierarchy. Registrars offer each domain extension to the general public. You may know some names, like GoDaddy, NameCheap, eNom, Google Domains, DreamHost among others. You may even have a domain name registered with them! Reclaim Hosting works with eNom, Logicboxes, and OpenSRS to register domains. We are considered resellers of domains which is one level below registrars.

But, even with that registrar hierarchy, users who purchase the domains names own those domain names. They can take those with them to another registrar or adjust their domain nameservers.

Requirements for Domains So with the hierarchy in place, there must be a lot of rules for domains right? Yes and no– there are requirements set up with Registrars, then the requirements ICANN places on domains. Most of these are to prevent domain theft or spam domains. I’ve come across a couple of rules:

Domains are locked for 60 days after a major change happens. This can happen after a domain is newly registered or transferred to its current registrar. It is locked after any major contact information change, like changes to the registrant email.
- Email is a primary point of contact for domain names, so you’ll want to make sure to use an email you check regularly.
- Within the 60 day mark, you cannot transfer the domain to another registrar. The domain is locked at it’s current registrar.
Verify your domain within 15 days of registration: This one is really important for folks just starting out. You need to verify your domain via email after the domain is registered. If you do not verify the domain it’s suspended and pointed away from the current hosting company.
- Tip: Be sure to use an email address that you check regularly to sign up for a domain. Reclaim’s found that users working with their University email, the email from our registrar does not make it to their inboxes. Emails from Gmail or Outlook are more reliable.
Make sure to use valid contact information. This includes a full billing/mailing address and email for the domain registration.

You can read through ICANNs list of FAQs and questions, they have an extensive list.

Domain Name Lifecycles So, now that you know the hierarchy of domain names and you’ve registered the domain, what does the lifecycle look like?

Domains can be registered starting at 1 year increments and can register up to 10 years at a time from the date of expiry. After the domain name is first registered, there are a couple of key dates, to keep in mind. There is typically a 24 hour-4 day money-back period (dependent on the registrar). From there, users will have that 15 day verification period I mentioned earlier. Once verified the domain is good to go for its registration period. Once the expiry date is reached, the domain moves into the grace period. During the grace period, the registrant can renew the domain at any time up to 30 days (roughly, again dependent on the registrar, some are longer than 30 days and others are super short) after the expiry date.

After the Grace period, the domain moves into the next phase, redemption, lasting for another 30 days. This phase is a little bit trickier to manage, as the domain name now incurs a fee to renew and bring the domain out of redemption. The redemption phase is preparing the domain for deletion. It’s also important to note that anyone can bring a domain out of redemption and register the domain in their name. So it’s important to keep track of your domain name’s lifecycle and make sure to renew it before it reaches this phase. The fee can range from $15-$200+ and is set by the particular registrar. Some can set the fee by the ICANN regulation or have a flat fee for redemptions where all domain names are the same fee to redeem.

Finally, there’s the deletion phase. After the redemption phase, the domain is moved into deletion where no one can renew or redeem the domain. The deletion lasts for 5 days, where the domain is released back to the public for anyone to register. There is a great graphic on our Domain Lifecycle guide that illustrates this as well.

Domain Name Transfers Once you register the domain, you can move registrars as needed. But there are a few things to keep in mind. First, the domain must be outside of the 60-day mark (as seen above) this is very important because you can’t transfer your domain within that period.

Second, you’ll want to disable the domain’s registrar lock (sometimes called theft protection). This is enabled by default to prevent the domain from being stolen.

Next, you’ll want to make sure to turn off privacy protection. Reclaim Hosting includes this within our pricing model to help protect our users’ data. Privacy protection masks your information from the public whois.com database for all domain names. Emails are sent out during this transfer process that you need to address to approve the transfer. The transfer uses whatever is listed within the WhoIS database, so it grabs the privacy protection domain as well. So it’s important to have the correct contact information listed to receive the emails.

Obtain a transfer authorization code/ EPP code. This code is unique to your domain and acts like a key to prove ownership. You’ll need to request one from your registrar or through your domain account from there.

After you receive all that information and make sure the domain name meets the requirements you can transfer the domain name. The domain transfer all in all takes 7 days to process from the time the order is placed. You’ll want to make sure to leave enough time for the domain to transfer before it expires.

Also important to note– when transferring a domain name, you are not transferring any content hosted on the domain. You’re only transferring the domain name registration. The content remains where it sits.

Whew ok, hopefully, this gives you a glimpse of what working with domain names looks like! There are some little quirks in place with the registrations but once you know what to look out for you can manage these easily!

Featured Image: Photo by David Travis on Unsplash

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This post is a bit random, but the other day I learned how to update the uneditable file properties on a Mac and wanted to share here so I would remember for later. (This is truly the main reason I blog, haha!) I noticed that when I downloaded a file from GoogleDocs and saved it as a .pdf, the “where from” section in File Properties gave this long, ugly docs.google.com URL:

In order to see this, you would right-click on any file and click “Get Info” You can edit most of the file properties on a Mac simply by right-clicking the file, going to “Get Info” and then scrolling down to the Name & Extension or Sharing & Permissions sections. You can also open the file in a .pdf viewer (I love PDF Expert) and then going to File > Properties. Even in that interface, however, I didn’t have the option to change or remove the “Where From” section:

file property editing options available in PDF Expert This obviously isn’t the end of the world, but not exactly ideal either when sharing professional documents with colleagues or institutions. I used trusty ol’ Google to find this article on viewing and removing extended file attributes, which said that I could make this change through my terminal. Perfect! I opened terminal and added the following command:

xattr -d com.apple.metadata:kMDItemWhereFroms

Next, I dragged & dropped my file into terminal to add in the file’s specific location on my mac:

drag and drop the file you want to edit into terminal Once doing so, it completed the following string in terminal:

xattr -d com.apple.metadata:kMDItemWhereFroms /Users/laurenhanks/Desktop/This\ is\ a\ test.pdf

I then clicked “enter” and that’s it. Now when I click “Get Info” on my file, this is what I see:

Pretty cool, right?

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Previously on Reclaim Cloud Learning; I talked through working with SSL certificates on the Cloud and Mattermost training, and now I’m going to be talking about working through databases to round out the Reclaim Cloud month. This one, in particular, surrounds accessing databases (like WordPress, or Mattermost) without the confirmation emails from Jelastic. I’ll walk you through getting access to the database node from your Cloud Dashboard without your database credentials. Reclaim Hosting uses this method on our support, so we don’t have to reach back to the user to see if they’ve saved the credential emails. It helps us save time going back and forth and getting to the root of an issue quicker.

After you install an application to your environment, say through WordPress or Mattermost, you’ll receive a few confirmation emails with passwords to various portions of the site. You’ll want to save these credentials but delete the email. You can use this method as well to access your node through Reclaim Cloud.

Accessing the Database Node First, however, the biggest step is to access the database node within your browser. You can access this a number of ways, first by going to the URL and using the specific port number. So for instance WordPress you can use env-3224720.us.reclaim.cloud:8443

You can also access it through a node if it is a separate instance within your environment like node9764-env-2948928.us.reclaim.cloud, you can use this when working with PostgreSQL too for Mattermost.

Once you’ve loaded the URL you should see a login screen:

Locating Credentials If you don’t have the credentials that were sent via email after the Jelastic, you can also locate the credentials within the site’s configuration files.

You’ll want to navigate to the file management system within your Cloud Dashboard, but you can also use WebSSH if you’d like. This will walk you through the file management system.

WordPress For WordPress, you’ll want to work through your wp-config.php file within /var/www/webroot/ROOT/wp-config.php

Connection settings should look like this:

// Database settings – You can get this info from your web host //

/* The name of the database for WordPress /

define( ‘DB_NAME’, ‘wp_7698727’ );

/* Database username /

define( ‘DB_USER’, ‘jelastic-6599005’ );

/* Database password /

define( ‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘vsecurepassword’ );

/* Database hostname /

define( ‘DB_HOST’, ‘127.0.0.1’ );

/* Database charset to use in creating database tables. /

define( ‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8’ );

/* The database collate type. Don’t change this if in doubt. /

define( ‘DB_COLLATE’, ” );

You’ll use the DB_USER and the DB_PASSWORD to access cPanel from there to access PHPMyAdmin.

Mattermost Mattermost is just a bit different! Since this is using PostgreSQL, the location varies on the file. You’ll want to navigate to the /root/mattermost/congfig/config.jsonfile.

The username, password, and database name are located on the DataSource line under SqlSettings. Should look like:

“DataSource”: “postgres://webadmin:nky9FicDb4@sqldb:5432/mattermost?sslmode=disable\u0026connect_timeout=10”,

Once you’re logged in you’re good to go! You can make changes to the database like you would through the user interface, like changing a siteURL or homepageURL or grabbing an export of the database.

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I wrote about changing your SiteURL and home page URL within your database if you’re working with a blank screen in WordPress, but I wanted to document what it looks like to change your WordPress theme from the database as well. I was working with users to set their site to the default WordPress themes if there was ever an error with the site. Say the theme was outdated and broke after an upgrade.

If your theme is wonky, you may see several different errors, a Critical Error in WordPress, an HTTP 500 Error, weird CSS on pages. If you have a Critical Error on your page or the HTTP 500 Error, you can also diagnose that within the error_log file within your cPanel. You may also lose access to your wp-admin dashboard to change the theme as well.

To start, you want to locate your database. This can be found within the wp-config.php file or within your Installatron instance for the site:

You’ll then want to navigate to PHPMyAdmin (I’m using cPanel in this instance).

Within the database, you’ll want to move to the wp_options table and locate the template and stylesheet.They typically are within the same lines as each other.

Next, you’ll want to locate the theme you’d like to change to. This is found in the wp-content/themes folder of the install. Any of the WordPress themes like twentytwentyone or twentytwentytwo will work. WordPress will default to these themes when working on an error.

Back in PHPMyAdmin, you can double click on the previous theme name and change it to the new theme.

Click out of the box and do the same for the template/stylesheet rows. Once changed your site should start to load again and you can begin to troubleshoot from there!

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I blogged about automations in Zendesk back a couple of years ago but I thought I’d take the time to document some of what we’ve done since! We’ve added more to round out specific functions of automation, triggers, groups, and service level agreements (SLAs) to help Zendesk work for Reclaim. It’s become an important part of our internal processes to route tickets to the right place and these processes are vital to how we can provide such great support to the Reclaim Community.

We also made a switch to Zendesk Guide to create a Help Center for Reclaim guides and tutorials spanning across Shared Hosting, Domain of One’s Own, Managed Hosting, and Reclaim Cloud. The Community Forums are still active, which we do reserve to be a forum for the community which is still very active!

Automations Bump/Solve To start, the biggest time saver we’ve worked with is Automations or time-based processes. We created a couple to improve our follow-up process, first, by the bump solve method we adapted (blogged in my previous post above). Within this two-part method, two separate automation run within 96 business hours. The first looks to see when the ticket was last updated, it does not contain specific tags, in a certain status (Pending, open, or on-hold), the ticket type is not set to Task. If all conditions are met, it will send a reminder email to the customer after 48 business hours if there is no update from either end (Reclaim or customer) in between. The automation then adds a tag to the ticket, which the second part looks for.

The action taken for bump/solve method After the “bump” tag is added, then the second part to the method checks for the tag. The second automation in the method checks for the tag after another 48 business hours. If the tag is present, the automation sends one more reminder email, before solving the ticket. If the user needs help they can also always reply to the ticket they originally created or email our support address for additional help.

Zendesk also added some system-specific automation, where they send out our satisfaction survey after the ticket’s been solved for 24 hours and closes out the ticket after is solved for 4 days.

Given the workload of our support team (we average about 600-1000 tickets per month throughout the year, which is about 100-200 per agent per month) the bump/solve method helps save hours off of our working day. We are able to follow up with users seamlessly.

Task Reminders We added one more automation that opens up tickets when their due date comes up, that we manage internally. We mainly use this for migration tickets, projects like server setups, and domain renewals. This helps us keep track of any pending action that is needed during this process. The agent assigned to the ticket gets a reminder email when the ticket is due.

Triggers Triggers within Zendesk are an action-based process, and by far the most used method Reclaim uses to organize tickets. We use them to notify users through a variety of ways– first when the ticket is submitted and we’ve received it, any responses from an agent. We’ve tailored these automatic responses to go out based on the time of day whether it’s in business hours, holidays, or regular hours. These also modify based on the type of ticket, say a migration or not. Some of our Agents use this workflow to keep track of tickets within their inbox

We’ve set up triggers to add tags to tickets based on various reasons:

Specific users, like Domain of One’s Own Admins. end-user support schools, or Professional Services customers. This adds an SLA to tickets so we know when we are working with schools in partiuclar.
Types of tickets, like migrations or particular support scenarios, like BYU students.
Internal Zendesk Groups, like Sales/Account Management, Support and, Instructional Technology. We use the Groups to organize tickets further internally.

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) SLAs are used within Reclaim internally as well is to let agents know when they are working with Institutional Clients, like Domain of One’s Own or Managed Hosting clients. Within the standard service level agreement signed, we have 1 hour to respond to support tickets during business hours and 24hours outside of business hours.

Reclaim prides itself on quick customer support so while 1 hour during business hours is super quick by industry standards, we always strive to go above and beyond to help with any question that comes our way.

With just a little legwork to create these functions in Zendesk, we created a semi-automated ticket workflow that helps us help our community!

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I’ve got some blogging to catch-up on this week, but I wanted to start with a quick recap of the our second community chat last week, the “State of Reclaim.” In this edition we wanted to invite folks to hear about the various things we are up to, including the imagining edtech at Reclaim, some ideas around professional development, Zero Trust Networks, Reclaim Cloud, the Domains API, and more.

It covered some ground, and one of the things we hear from folks in attendance was that they are interested in more training and better documentation. In fact, documentation for Domain of One’s Own schools has come up a couple of times last week alone, and I do think it is time we think about how we might revisit that, it’s tricky given folks want modular documentation that they can customize, but would still like to pull from a white-label pool provided by us. We’ve thought through that before, and perhaps something using Github with flat files, hell we were even imagining this with Dokuwiki in 2014, but it never fully materialized. Thankfully Oklahoma was generous enough to clone their documentation for other schools, which was a godsend. So, documentation was definitely one theme.

Another topic that seemed to be of interest was more professional development. We floated the idea of focused workshops on “Reclaim Cloud,” and Larry from Stanford was interested in a more advanced, 200-level DoOO admin training on WHM and WHMCS—both of which could be interesting. The other idea floated was pairing two or three schools up for semester-long, focused development driven by specific goals for what they want to achieve, with the idea of sharing this across campuses to reinforce a broader-sense collaborative energy that already exists between numerous schools. Kinda like a protracted workshop over the course of a semester that goes beyond just the ins and outs of the tech and looks at the broader vision of what is trying to be accomplished based on the school’s implicit or explicit mission or the project. It’s been termed “Penpals” internally, and I kinda like the idea of taking more time to think through the actual application of these technologies in classes with faculty and students.

Anyway, the community chats are already working their magic by connecting us with the folks who use Reclaim on the regular, and letting us know what they need to get their job done better.

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SSL certificates, oh SSL certificates. Where to begin? These little certificates help hold the big web securely together to protect websites. But they are finicky. Reclaim Hosting uses Let’s Encrypt across our infrastructure and using it on Reclaim Cloud was a no-brainer. Jelastic partners with Let’s Encrypt to bring SSL certificates as an addon to most environments.

This week was all about SSL certificates. And continuing on-trend with Reclaim Cloud learning, specifically using a custom wildcard SSL certificate for a few WordPress Multisite’s Reclaim Hosting manages.

I’d always issued SSL certificates through Let’s Encrypt in cPanel or within the Addon feature in Reclaim Cloud. Let’s Encrypt makes it super easy to work with the SSL certificates by provisioning and renewing automatically.

Let’s Encrypt Addon Sometimes though, the SSL certificate doesn’t provision properly. So a quick tip I found (thanks to Goutam!) you can add your custom URL to the Let’s Encrypt add-on. So while your URL is active and online, Let’s Encrypt will need a “refresher” to issue the certificate to that particular URL.

If the URL is not listed you can add it to the external domains section and apply the setting. You will need to update the SSL certificate from here.

Custom SSL The next options through Reclaim Cloud for SSL is a custom SSL certificate. You can purchase the SSL certificate from an external company and work with that with your environment. I found that the SSL documentation on Jelastic was super helpful in this capacity. We recently had to add an SSL certificate to cover a wildcard subdomain, for a WordPress multisite.

The custom SSL certificate needs 3 items to implement, a server key, intermediate certificate, and the domain certificate.

First, we needed to generate the certificate signing request (CSR). This is done through a program like OpenSSL and it runs through the WebSSH feature for the environment. Once we have the CSR, we’ll receive a server key. The server key is uploaded to our environment, then send the user the CSR.

Then the user will use the CSR to generate the Intermediate Certificate and finally the Domain Certificate. The Intermediate Certificate is used with the provisioning company to ensure they’re verified to issue the SSL certificate to Reclaim and to the user. These are then sent back to Reclaim to upload to the environment.

Once all 3 items are in place, we can issue the SSL certificate for the environment. We did run into the issue where we needed to reissue the Let’s Encrypt plugin to cover the main URL on the WPMS from there.

Typically SSL certificates can last 3months when working with Let’s Encrypt, or 1 year+ when working with another company. Let’s Encrypt renews automatically while the third party certificate will need to be updated manually.

This process was super interesting to learn, as I’ve only worked with SSL through Let’s Encrypt previously and realized how easy it is to provide your own certificate through a third party if needed!

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This post will likely be less organized, and more of a messy stream of consciousness has I make sense of the new Instructional Tech team/offering/thing at Reclaim Hosting. Documenting my way of thinking at a given time is challenging, but I think this is necessary for reflection and later use.

We have been toying with the idea of an instructional tech offering or service at Reclaim Hosting for some time, but our team has been too small in the past to have the capacity to really own or do it justice. But now that the Instructional Tech thing is beginning to take shape (and more on that in a minute) I’m finding that a lot of the work we’ve already been doing is further reinforcing this idea. We’ve dabbled in workshops & trainings. I’ve sent out (infrequent) newsletters to admins about the “happenings” at Reclaim. We have open forums to engage with the community. Our support has always gone above and beyond, whether you pay us $30/year or $3,000/year. So seeing these common themes with the budding working of Instructional Tech at Reclaim has already been cool to witness in and of itself.

As with anything though, there’s a balance with what we’ve been able to take on over the years, and our time has more or less been filled with keeping the ship afloat. Newsletters haven’t been as consistent as I would’ve liked. Support documentation needed to be refreshed. We’ve had to set boundaries around what we can and can’t support, and we’re protective with our time in terms of the projects that we take on. Until recently, due to time and tech constraints, we’ve had to say “no” to various things like hosting certain applications that are not compatible in a cPanel environment, acting as a consultant on a unique digital project, or offering our support/insight for edge cases.

While Instructional Tech at Reclaim is still very new, one immediately clear change that I’m seeing is that we’re now able to say “yes” to more. “Yes” to unique digital projects in Reclaim Cloud, “yes” to more workshops/meetings/areas for community engagement. “Yes” to consistent newsletters. That part of Instructional Tech is already really cool. I’ve also really enjoyed being apart of the Instructional Tech team meetings each week, which usually run close to two hours, and are filled with “what if we did this” type conversations. All the ideas that are brimming at the surface brings a newfound energy to Reclaim, which personally for me is always welcomed. I’ve been with Reclaim for coming up on seven years now, so finding new elements of inspiration is crucial for my personal happiness.

It seems like others are excited too. We’ve taken a few early meetings with some institutions to check in and see how they’re doing, and also introduce or share our ideas about Instructional Tech at Reclaim. I’m excited to document this more in future posts.

Now if I put my business hat on for a moment, I want to make sure we’re balancing the amount of new work we’re taking on, so we can build sustainable internal practices and avoid burnout. In order to do Instructional Tech at Reclaim right, it needs to be slow, steady, and acheivable. There is no doubt that Reclaim Hosting is busy, so balancing the new excitement with realistic goals for our team is something that I’m thinking through on an almost daily basis. I want to be mindful of the work that we’re taking on, and I want to make sure that we’re not biting off more than we can chew. Where is the work happening? For instance, the work doesn’t only happen in an hour long meeting with a school. There’s prep time beforehand, internal conversations or diagnosis with our Infrastructure team, post follow up work, and then any research or tasks that come as a result of the meeting itself. And if 2-3 Reclaim team members are on the call, that work is doubled or tripled.

As for now, we’re still in an exploratory phase of seeing what works and what doesn’t work. In these moments, I find that leaning into the community and being transparent as possible is the best way forward. We have to be open about how Instructional Tech at Reclaim is new, that we’re still learning and open to feedback, and we want to know what the community needs. I’m a very visual person, so for me, this means that Reclaim should be “stepping off the pedestal” so to speak (not that we like being there in the first place), and instead sitting around a table with other institutions, sleeves rolled up, and ready to work hard alongside everyone else. I’ve found that folks are much more receptive to that approach, vs. Reclaim Hosting walking in, chest puffed out, acting like we have a solution for every problem.

I also know that the exploratory phase means that we’ll likely be saying “yes” to a lot more at first, and then ultimately reining it in once we understand where Reclaim Hosting services can be most useful or effective. In our most recent brainstorming meeting about this, our ideas have landed on the following:

Workshops, targeted and built for a school’s unique set of needs
Additional training for new DoOO institutions. (Ok so you have DoOO… now what?)
One-off consultative meetings about growing digital projects on campus, account cleanup, migration strategies, or something custom
Professional Development/one-off consultation meetings with Edtech & Faculty
Focusing on Reclaim Cloud containers and docker
Tools for virtual/hybrid learning or meetings/workshops– OBS, StreamYard, YouTube Live, PeerTube
Increased Managed WordPress Multisite support via workshops, documentation
Monthly consultative meetings with Admins- regular checking in, feedback, strategizing
Skilled Tasks: Site/Content Archival, Community Showcase Site, best practices for accessibility
Monthly Community Chat, monthly newsletters

See what I mean? Reclaim has never had a problem with ideas. :) We just now have to hone in on what makes sense & what would be most valuable or helpful for our Community. Also, charging for some of this stuff seems weird. I think it’s important for Reclaim Hosting to still go “above and beyond” without putting everything behind a paywall, but where that paywall lies is still up in the air. While writing this, the following visual came to mind:

In short, Instructional Tech will allow us to do more. The other large shift I’m seeing is more of an internal one; a culture shift amongst the Reclaim Hosting team. If you look at the above bullet point list, everything listed there boils down to support. Instructional Tech is support. There’s also a crossover between Instructional Tech and our Sales/Account Management team, in terms of understanding relationships and backstories, offering helpful recommendations, and being apart of initial onboarding conversations. There’s a lot of instructional tech work that our Sales/Account Management team has already been doing as well, like workshops, trainings, and consultative meetings. Finally, for every edge case and unique digital project that needs to diagnosed and/or hosted at Reclaim, our Infrastructure team plays an essential role in making sure these projects are running successfully. What’s more, we look to our Infrastructure team to help facilitate internal professional development trainings. Instructional Tech bleeds into everything that we already do externally, but also internally as well. So, it makes sense that this feels like more than just a new service we’re providing. It’s changing the way that we work internally to undo perceptions, change mindsets, and create purposeful crossover amongst the teams. I really believe that the introduction of Instructional Tech at Reclaim will not only provide more pathways of engagement for our community, but also for our employees.

To end, I’ll mention that Reclaim’s second Community Chat will take place tomorrow, Feb 9, and I don’t think it could come at a better time. The chat is called “State of Reclaim” and all teams will be invited to participate & speak briefly about the work that they’re doing, amongst other things. I’m looking forward to it!

Blog Post Featured Image: “over the sun” by Meyer Felix is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

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A lot of our support tickets naturally revolve around Account Management & Billing questions, which is to be expected. Behind the scenes, Reclaim Hosting uses WHMCS for all Shared Hosting billing, as well as Domain of One’s Own schools to automatically create cPanel accounts when invoices are marked as paid. There are scenarios where our support team needs to be notified when a specific invoice is marked as paid so additional work can happen. Examples of why notifications are helpful include:

waiting for a paid invoice in order to begin a site migration
manually renewing an account for multiple years
activating a promo code for a bulk shared hosting invoice

What’s more, we need to be able to say, “hey WHMCS, do not automatically suspend this account for X number of days, regardless of invoice due date” or “while we’re waiting for payment, do not suspend/terminate this account.” This scenario is used often for institutional accounts that have delays with their Purchasing departments and have reached out to our Support team for a due date extension.

By setting up a WHMCS Client Group, assigning that Group to a particular user profile, and then bringing that notification into Slack, we’re able to accomplish all of the above. I just recently to set this up for BYU’s WHMCS as part of their Project Decommissioning (thank you, Gordon, for the idea!) so I thought it would be a great time to share how its done. This workflow is used regularly at Reclaim and could potentially be helpful for future scenarios or DoOO schools. This guide also assumes that you have WHMCS and Slack. At the end of this post, I’ll share a list of documentation I referenced as well.

Step One: Create and Assign a Client Group In WHMCS, navigate to Setup > Client Groups. For newer versions of WHMCS, this will be under System Settings > Client Groups.

Next, create a new Client Group by filling out the fields under Add Client Group. You’ll want to select a color for the group and check the box for “Exempt from Suspend & Terminate.” Next, click Save Changes.

From here, you can head to any WHMCS user profile, go to the Profile Tab, find the Client Group field, and select your new group from the dropdown menu:

Step Two: Creating an App for Slack Make sure you’re logged into your Slack account, and then head to api.slack.com. Click Create an app. On the next page, click Create New App, and then select From Scratch as the method for configuring the app.

Then give your App a name, and select your Slack workspace. When complete, click Create App.

I called my app BYU WHMCS and selected the Reclaim Hosting workspace. On the following page, navigate to the Building Apps for Slack > Add Features and Functionality section and then select Permissions.

Scroll down to Scopes > Bot Token Scopes, and then select Add an OAuth Scope. Add the following permissions:

1) channels:join 2) channels:read 3) chat:write 4) groups:read

Once complete, scroll back up and click Install App to Workspace. You’ll then want to confirm that you authorize these permissions by clicking Allow on the following page.

You should now have a new Bot User OAuth Token that has been generated. Copy and save this for later use.

Step Three: Connecting Slack App with WHMCS Return back to WHMCS and head to Setup > Notifications. For newer versions of WHMCS, this will be under System Settings > Notifications:

On the following page, you’ll see a Slack box. Click Configure. In the next pop-up window, paste your newly created Bot User OAuth Token (which WHMCS is calling OAuth Access Token). Click Save Changes.

If entered correctly, the popup window will close and you will be ready to proceed with the final step.

Step Four: Creating a WHMCS Notification Rule This is now where you can set the rules and scenarios the notifications you want to receive from WHMCS. Set the Rule Name, Event, Conditions, and Notification Settings. Once complete, select Save Changes. In order to be notified for paid invoices, this is what I selected:

Rule Name (WHMCS internal use): BYU Flagged Customer Invoice payment notification
Event: Invoice, Paid
Conditions: Any, Reclaim Support Notification Client Group
Notification Settings: Slack, #support-team Slack Channel, Custom Message for Slack. Once done, make sure your notification rule is togged On:

Testing and Customizing Slack Notification In order to test your new Notification rule, you’ll want to replicate the steps needed in order to trigger the notification in a test WHMCS profile. For me, I simply made sure my test account was assigned to the proper Client Group (step one) and then marked a test invoice as paid. The notification came through in Slack as expected!

If you want to customize how the notification looks in Slack, that would be done back in the Slack App section from Step Two. Head to api.slack.com/apps and select your newly created Slack App. Scroll down to Display Information and adjust settings for App Name, Description, Background color, and App Icon.

Now you can test the notification once again, and you should see those adjustments added:

All done! If you’re looking for additional reading, here’s a list of relevant documentation:

WHMCS Client Groups
WHMCS Configuring Notifications with Slack
WHMCS Notifications & Creating a Notification Rule
Slack Access Tokens
Slack Basic App setup

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One of my goals for 2022 is to spend some more focused time learning as much as I can on Reclaim Cloud. I’ve realized more (more now lately) that I am completely new to this mystical “Cloud” and all that’s possible with it. I initially took some training when we first started to get prepared on admin side of Reclaim Cloud where we can manage any user management and billing.

With the admin side training, I am very new to everything Cloud related. And with the Cloud, the possibilities are endless, which is super daunting. But I’ve been challenging myself to take some of the Reclaim Cloud tickets that come through support to tackle learning a bit at a time.

This first started when Jim was working on a Mattermost upgrade for a client. We’d been working on getting the container software up to the most recent version of Mattermost.

So Taylor, Jim and I jumped in a huddle in Slack (sidenote: this is the best feature in Slack by far, I’ve been using this a ton in the last couple of weeks) to look over getting the older version of Mattermost migrated to a new container without losing content. And after an hour and a half of talking and brainstorming, we made some headway!

I was in completely new territory. The core functions of Mattermost require MySQL or PostgreSQL as the database. This install was set up using PostgreSQL, which is not a database I’ve worked with until this point. We needed access to the database to export a copy as we migrate to the new clone. We first tried to run the commands to import/export from the WebSSH console, but quickly realized that we’ll need the username and password for the database in particular. The only problem, we didn’t have the username and password to access PostgreSQL.

The user is emailed the username and password when the Postgre database is set up on the environment but to eliminate some back and forth with the customer we decided to look through the config files to find the username and password. This is one feature cPanel does really well, adding an SSO aspect to PHPMyAdmin, that I’ve taken for granted. But I’ve used the config files to gain access to the databases for WordPress of Omeka migrations in the past, so I figured we could use the same method for Mattermost! There’s a config file somewhere right?

Looking through the Mattermost documentation, I was able to locate the configuration files necessary to grab the database user and password! Ah ha! Once we had that we could grab an export of the database within phpPgAdmin. After the export happened, it was smooth sailing from there, after a failed attempt to rsync from a docker container, we quickly realized we could SCP to a local machine and back to the final location.

Now for future Meredith to refer back to– some documentation we used during the migration:

SQL Dump through Postgre SQL
Configuration in Mattermost Database
phpPgAdmin node URL
Postgresguide to Psql
Docker Hub Mattermost repo
Import/Export Database in phpPgAdmin
Rsync from host computer to docker container
Dump and restore database from docker container

I later had to jump off the huddle to work through the Support queue but I would say this was a massive success!! I found that this was by far the best Cloud learning experience I’ve had to date, and I’m super excited for more to come.

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Last Summer, Jim and I met with the administrators of BYU domains, Nate Walton, Joe Hadfield, and Jason Renfro and were told that BYU and the Office of IT would be retiring the BYU Domains service at the end of December 2021. Reclaim Hosting has worked very closely with BYU over the last six years to bring Domain of One’s Own onto campus and into classrooms. Over that time, BYU Domains grew to become our largest Domain of One’s Own institution to date with over 14,000 users, all of which received their own Top Level Domain. This is no doubt attributed to the work that Nate, Joe, and Jason have carried out, as well as folks like Peter Sentz and an entire team of student workers and members of OIT have done to support the initiative. It as been insanely cool to watch BYU Domains scale over the years, and Reclaim Hosting is incredibly lucky to have worked with such a fantastic partner while discovering the potential of Domain of One’s Own.

All good things do come to an end, and through this blog post I hope to acknowledge the other side of this job which isn’t commonly addressed: Decommissioning Domain of One’s Own. This post will be a deep dive of this work. After we were told that BYU OIT would be reallocating resources to other services, we immediately began brainstorming ways to make sure that 14 servers’ worth of users would have a seamless transition to whatever came next. That was, and has continued to remain, priority number one.

Phase One: Brainstorming & Prep Reclaim Hosting has existing migration strategies in place for end users that are looking to move away from Domain of One’s Own. In short, they can grab a backup of their cPanel and take it with them to any number of hosting companies, or they can sign up for a Shared Hosting account at Reclaim Hosting and we’ll migrate their content for free. Over the years, we have carried out hundreds of migrations from graduating BYU students looking to continue hosting their digital projects. While this works on an individual basis we knew that this workflow would not scale; it would overwhelm our support team and it would require work from each user to sign up for an account at Reclaim.

I went to the drawing board two or three times to come up with the best way forward. After multiple brainstorming meetings with Jim, Tim, and the BYU Team, we landed on the following:

Reclaim Hosting would take over all BYU Domains accounts by rebranding existing infrastructure, bringing servers into the Reclaim Shared Hosting fold. Eventually, Reclaim would consolidate active accounts into existing Shared Hosting servers.

My other considerations:

Timelines. We needed to be able to “flip the switch” for end users no later than end of December/beginning of January. We had to consider domain renewal dates at the registrar, new signups at the beginning of the Fall 2021 semester, and time for communication and reminders to users.
Language. Given we were merging the support of two teams (BYU OIT and Reclaim Hosting) it was important to make sure everyone was on the same page about when and what was happening. We also needed to be unified in how it was announced to users in mass email, support tickets, and support documentation.
Infrastructure Configuration. By “adopting” BYU servers and bringing accounts into our Shared Hosting fold, we would have to evaluate the disk usage of all accounts and then assign each account to one of our Shared Hosting plans. Moving away from Single Sign On and into Client Area Portal was also something we had to work through.
Support. By taking over BYU Domains at the end of the year, how would that impact our support ticket numbers? We would need to look to BYU for this one to get a sense of their support analytics, and how that would translate as Reclaim took over ownership.
Edge Cases. Not everyone would fit the mold of our shared hosting plans when it came to storage and/or account resources. Additionally, BYU was looking to carry on funding the hosting costs for larger departmental sites. We had to have a way to “flag” or separate the edge cases from the mix.

Given all the moving parts, I needed a place to manage simultaneous tasks and project milestones, delegate work, keep track of our progress, and stay in constant communication with everyone. Asana became my backbone for all Reclaim Hosting work, and then I stayed in communication with BYU using email, Google Drive, and good ol’ fashioned spreadsheets.

This is a screenshot of the Overview Tab of the Asana Project. Looking back now, its pretty cool to see the timeline on the righthand sidebar: when the project was created all the way through company-wide communication.

Phase Two: Planning and “Flipping the Switch” This is where the real work began! That summer we asked BYU Admins to begin culling through all existing accounts and clear out/remove anyone that no longer needed a cPanel account. As with any DoOO Institution, we helped in this case by receiving a .csv of accounts to be removed, backing up their accounts one last time, and then terminating them in bulk. Through this process, we were able to consolidate 14 servers down into 10 servers. Getting rid of the fluff was the first step in preparing for the changeover to Reclaim.

Next, we decided on “End of Life” Timeline. Here is a rough outline of what worked for both teams:

Sept 1 – Nov 1: BYU to communicate changes to entire community
Sept 15 – Nov 15: Flag all byu.edu domains “edge cases”
Oct 1: Turning off new signups
Nov 1: Have all email templates, support macros & documentation drafted to review with BYU Admins
Nov 15: Make changes to language as needed
Dec 1: Reclaim’s voice introduced in a “Here’s what’s coming” email
Dec 20: Publish Support Articles
Dec 27-31: Rebrand infrastructure/logins to Reclaim Hosting
Jan 3: Generate Invoices, Generate passwords, Send an Account welcome email to all users
Jan 3 – Feb 3: Tackle incoming support requests
Jan 27 – Feb 2: Invoice Reminder emails
Feb 3: Suspend unpaid accounts, notify users
Feb 3 – March 3: Tackle incoming Support Requests around suspended sites
Feb 7-11: Tally up list of users that have paid after initial 30 days, plan for system migrations in the new year
Feb 25: Account Pending Termination email
Mar 3: Backup and terminate suspended accounts
Mar 3-31: Tackle Incoming Support Requests around terminated sites, restore as needed
March – May: Server consolidation as needed to migrate active accounts into existing Shared Hosting servers

As you can see from the timeline, the months leading up were more or less about communicating upcoming changes, introducing Reclaim Hosting to BYU Domains users, and making sure our team had a solid game plan for the change of ownership. We got all communication written and approved, notified and prepped the support team for incoming tickets, and made sure Infrastructure had what they needed in order to test out changes and be ready for game time by end of year. As of January 3, we “flipped the switch” and are now in the phase of tackling support requests. This means letting folks adjust to the change, ask questions about what hosting looks like at Reclaim, and understand what their annual invoice will look like going forward. These are support resources available for users as well:

BYU Domains to Reclaim Hosting: Everything you need to know
BYU Domains to Reclaim Hosting: Logging In/Resetting your Password
BYU Domains to Reclaim Hosting: Paying your invoice

It has been really cool to watch all teams at Reclaim step up and prepare for this project during the various phases, and it gets me stoked for other team projects down the road. Asana also helped a ton by allowing me to delegate work & timelines to various teams as well as specific people. Certain tasks are dependent on other work happening, and Asana is great for tracking that, too. (read: Asana Task Dependencies)

I’m pretty proud of how we’ve been able to stick to this timeline, no matter the circumstances. Ultimately, I think this has been successful because we set realistic milestones and added flex space in between tasks for unforeseen situations to arise. Planning for the unknown and being flexible to change is a crucial part of keeping large projects afloat. While we are now over the bulk of the work (i.e. rebranding, taking over ownership) the project will still likely carry into early summer as we undergo multiple rounds of server consolidation after active account numbers are reassessed. Even still, this is a great time to press the pause button and celebrate the work done thus far.

I’ve especially enjoyed working closely with Chris in Infrastructure as he has played a key role in configuring the server(s) for this change, and his way of finding solutions for seemingly impossible tasks is always amazing to watch play out. A lot of my role in this project was saying, “Hey Chris, what happens to SSO?” knowing that something would have to change to about the way folks were logging in, but having no clue how to make it from point A to point B.

At some point I’d love to sit down with him and reflect about how everything was handled, think of things we may have done differently now knowing what we know, etc. but overall big kudos to Chris for his management of infrastructure tasks.

Now as I reach the end of my reflection, it simply would not be complete without mentioning the absolute day-maker that happened at the end of the year:

The note says:
Lauren, Thank you for making the handoff of BYU Domains so graceful. I made sure to sing Reclaim’s praise in my presentation at EduCause in October. I hope most of the active users stick with you. Best, Joe Receiving a handwritten thank-you note from Joe was so appreciated, and a cherry on top to this project. No, BYU Domains- Thank YOU!

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I’m excited to announce that starting this month, we will be allowing Web Developers to share their custom, 1-click application installers with the Reclaim Hosting Community. This means that if you have an application in mind that you’d like to make widely accessible to 200+ institutions, you may do so by building out a custom, 1-click installer and submitting it to Reclaim Hosting for review. We’ll still be watching our Feature Requests for improvements and additions, of course, but now anyone who wants to share their application and build alongside the Reclaim team will be able to do so.

You can view our full list of existing 1-click application installers (both in cPanel/Installatron and in Reclaim Cloud), and you can also learn more about our existing custom 1-click installers (and how they differ from Site Templates) by reading this article.

Overview This has been an internal topic of conversation at Reclaim Hosting since roughly October of last year. The idea of allowing others to contribute to applications available to the Reclaim Hosting community is exciting for me, but the process is quickly muddied when thinking about all the different types of applications out there. Installatron vs. Reclaim Cloud installers… what are the steps? How can developers test the installers in our environment? What if the applications aren’t kept up to date over time? How do we support installers we haven’t built? How do we make sure that what we’re offering is sustainable for the community? All of these questions were considered as I put together the following webpages:

Custom Applications Landing page: reclaimhosting.com/applications/custom-installers
Installatron Installer instructions: reclaimhosting.com/applications/installatron-instructions
Reclaim Cloud Installer instructions: reclaimhosting.com/applications/reclaim-cloud-instructions
Submission Checklist: reclaimhosting.com/applications/submission-checklist
Software Developer Agreement: reclaimhosting.com/applications/software-developer-agreement

Landing Page

Given there would be different instructions for Installatron and Reclaim Cloud, as well as potential questions about how to submit an application for review and what developers are agreeing to in the process, it was super clear that we needed a landing page that we could point folks to that had all resources available. I needed this page to offer an overview, include stepping stones for resources, highlight our commitment to sustainability, and take submissions. I used an Elementor template for the design, so it was ultimately quite simple to get up and running once it was properly formatted and we had the correct content to fill in.

Hovering over each block shows “Learn more” buttons. I also like that this page gives me the flexibility to layer in additional “stepping stones” or resources as this project ebbs and flows. One of the first things I’m looking to expand upon will be a Case Study with Learnful Labs, but I will save those details for another post. :)

For the Submission form at the end of the page, I’m actually using a generic Elementor form here. I tested a Gravity Forms embed, and there was nothing particularly wrong with it, but I ultimately liked the look and feel of Elementor’s. The submission form is made up of three parts: Contact Info, Application Info, and Agreement. To help with the Contact & Application info sections, I created a Submission Checklist page. As for the Agreement step, I added in a checkbox with an embedded link to Reclaim Hosting’s new Software Developer Agreement, so anyone who submits an installer must first acknowledge these terms. Here’s what was used:

By checking this box, you are agreeing to the terms outlined in the Reclaim Hosting <a href="https://reclaimhosting.com/applications/software-developer-agreement/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Software Developer Agreement</a>. If you have any questions, please <a href="https://support.reclaimhosting.com/hc/en-us/articles/1500007028041-How-to-Contact-Reclaim-Hosting-Support" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">contact Reclaim Hosting</a> before proceeding.

As a small aside, while doing this^, I ended up learning about something called Tabnabbing. Essentially this an exploit that uses the browser’s default behavior with target="_blank" to gain partial access to your page through the window.object API. So basically this just means that when you’re creating hyperlinks that open up in a new tab, you should add rel="noopener noreferrer" to prevent that. The more you know!

Installer Instructions

Installatron Installer Instructions

Reclaim Cloud Installer Instructions

For each set of installer instructions, I worked with Tim to make sure we were providing an outline of requirements, packaging instructions, and testing information for each environment. Given every application and their required environment(s) will look different, the instructions are fairly open-ended, though pointed towards existing documentation from our providers. For example, this is the quickest way to create a Reclaim Cloud installer, as described from our upstream provider, Jelastic. In terms of testing, Reclaim Hosting is happy to provide access to a Demo cPanel/Installatron server or extended Free Trial access in Reclaim Cloud as necessary.

I chose to use a Tab layout for both sets of instructions in order to simplify the look of each section. Each step is inconsistent in that some have screenshots and they vary in lengths, so placing things in a list format, for instance, would ultimately look choppy and incomplete. Similar to the landing page “stepping stones” I also like that this allows me to add new steps or information with minimal disruption to the page design.

Software Developer Agreement

Incorporating a Software Developer Agreement was a less glamorous, but no less important step for us. In order for protect our community and guarantee that what we’re offering is sustainable long-term, it is crucial that Web Developers are taking ownership of the application installers that they are building. Big shoutout to Chris & Justin Webb for their insight & help with this. Here are the cliff notes:

You (Web Developer) acknowledge that software updates are a continued requirement within an ecosystem that relies upon other products and services. As such, it is expected that you will update and maintain your product on a recurring basis and no less than annually.
Reclaim Hosting reserves the right to periodically review all applications and custom products. Upon review, if vulnerabilities or impacting issues are found that affect (or involve) your application, Reclaim Hosting will notify you of the issue with the expectation you will patch or update your product and submit for review within a timely fashion. Issues are evaluated on a case-by-case basis, and in circumstances where vulnerabilities are severe or present risk to the customer or other systems, Reclaim Hosting reserves the right to temporarily remove your product until such time as it has been updated successfully.
Reclaim Hosting works to provide support to all of its customers and to conduct basic triage, troubleshooting and assistance. However, for in-depth (“2nd tier or 3rd tier”) support related to your application, Reclaim Hosting reserves the right to redirect customers directly to you for investigation or remediation of issues.

Next Steps: Submissions & Review

Those interested in building out a custom application installer may reference the Submission Checklist, which provides a full list of what’s needed for a complete submission. Custom Installers that are submitted to Reclaim Hosting will undergo internal review with our Support and Infrastructure Teams, and we’ll be in touch throughout that process to work through any areas of improvement. This will allow us to make sure that what we’re releasing to the community at large will be solid and around for the long haul.

This is an exciting step for Reclaim Hosting, and I can’t wait for what’s to come.

Reclaim Hosting: Recent Episodes

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