Domain of One’s Own – Reclaim Hosting https://www.reclaimhosting.com Take Control of your Digital Identity Fri, 28 Jul 2023 21:06:54 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.4 https://www.reclaimhosting.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/RHprofilelogo-100x100.png Domain of One’s Own – Reclaim Hosting https://www.reclaimhosting.com 32 32 A refreshed look for Domain of One’s Own and StateU https://laurenhanks.com/a-refreshed-look-for-domain-of-ones-own-and-stateu/ Fri, 28 Jul 2023 21:06:54 +0000 https://laurenhanks.com/?p=5845 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 Reclaim’s 10th birthday and we started reminiscing about one of the first iterations of the site:

Screenshot taken from Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine – September 15, 2013.

The screenshot above from September 2013 has one hosting option available at Reclaim for $12 total. Pretty amazing. A year or two later, Reclaim services were a little more defined:

^This was the website header by 2015 with a defined menu of services for Shared Hosting, Managed Software Hosting, and Domain of One’s Own

Here’s a screenshot of how I remember the DoOO page looking when I joined Reclaim in June 2015:

Screenshot available on Wayback Machine

In 2018 I published a refreshed version of the Reclaim website to something that more closely resembles what it looks like today, and actually blogged about the process here: Website Redesign for Reclaim. (So many great before & after screenshots on that post!) Since then, I’ve been slowly working to update product & landing pages even further, given some of the original font choices were harder to read and our services/team/needs have only become more varied and nuanced. As we’ve taken on more projects, events, and services, I’ve also tried to keep in mind the importance of having a cohesive and recognizable brand (i.e. consistent colors, site copy, artwork, etc.). There have been a lot of minor adjustments through the years to help with this, and I touched on this most recently in my blog post, Reclaim Community, which unveiled a lot of the new TV monitor artwork for, you guessed it, all things Reclaim Community.

Really leaning into the VHS tape / retro TV metaphor through the years has helped us find our footing with all the different moments of Reclaim artwork (Reclaim Roadshow, Reclaim Cloud, Rockaway Hosting, to name a few) and now I’m excited to be one step closer in bringing those pieces together under one roof. There’s still more to be done (I’m looking at you, Reclaim Cloud & Institutions pages) but to have Shared, Managed, and DoOO pages done feels pretty nice! Onto DoOO…

Here’s what we were working with before:

The “Before” DoOO page

It was high time to give this page a much-needed refresh. As mentioned above, some of the font choices were harder to read, and the screenshots were outdated. I also think this page didn’t do a great job of quickly defining what Domain of One’s Own is or what’s possible. The site visitor had to do a lot of digging to get the information they needed, and it was muddied further with linking directly to our formal policies and agreements on the product landing page. So, I set out to simplify and clarify everything. It was actually good practice, too. What is DoOO in 2-3 sentences max? How does someone get started? Can they test it out before hand? What does it cost? Well, I’ll tell ya:

The “After” DoOO page

There’s still some zig-zagging that happens visually as you scroll through the page, just as all iterations of this page have had, but I got rid of the monitors and site screenshots which felt cluttered. Instead, I focused on the the artwork, clean definitions, and available support resources – a lot of which weren’t really available during the last design round. And as always, these sorts of updates are not possible without the amazing artwork from Bryan Mathers, and I really love how he blended the green spider web from one of the early DoOO visuals with Reclaim’s current logo.

This page also highlights new artwork for stateu.org, our Demo Domain of One’s Own school, which I updated as part of this project:

The new logo & banner on stateu.org, courtesy of Bryan Mathers
An updated banner & monitors for new Domain of One’s Own schools, should they so choose

I had fun with this project, and I’m looking forward to making more improvements on the Reclaim site over time. Happy Birthday, Reclaim!

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A running list for the Domains Package https://laurenhanks.com/a-running-list-for-the-domains-package/ Thu, 04 May 2023 19:22:37 +0000 https://laurenhanks.com/?p=5788 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
the “before” version, which is overdue for a refresh
The 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/community
Pulling 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/docs

Similarly, 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.com

Pilot 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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A running list for the Domains Package https://laurenhanks.com/a-running-list-for-the-domains-package/ Thu, 04 May 2023 19:22:37 +0000 https://laurenhanks.com/?p=5788 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
the “before” version, which is overdue for a refresh
The 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/community
Pulling 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/docs

Similarly, 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.com

Pilot 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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A New Model for Domains: DoOO & WPMS https://laurenhanks.com/new-model-for-domains-dooo-wpms/ Fri, 02 Sep 2022 15:28:36 +0000 https://laurenhanks.com/?p=5535 Read More »A New Model for Domains: DoOO & WPMS]]> 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 conversation has always been a matter of choice– Do I need Domain of One’s Own or WordPress Multisite?

More recently, the “either or” decision has changed to a dialogue about the value in running DoOO and WPMS side by side. These tools can offer a pretty powerful way to meet the needs of a much larger, diverse group of learners and educators. I’m really fascinated by this conversation, and have enjoyed watching a few schools in our community lay the foundation for bringing these two services under one roof. Before diving further, let me first outline DoOO and WPMS for those that are hearing this for the first time:

Domain of One’s Own:
In short, Domain of One’s Own is at-scale cPanel hosting for a higher ed community. These cPanel dashboards include access to over 100 open source applications like WordPress, Omeka/S, and Scalar, as well as access to key functions for managing a digital presence like DNS, Databases, and File/PHP Managers. cPanel accounts are automatically provisioned to end users upon signup, and all accounts sit behind a custom homepage/login portal that can be branded for a given institution. The beauty of Domains is that end users can login quickly with their campus credentials via Single Sign On, and they can be up and running with a domain of their choosing in a matter of seconds. Domain of One’s Own encourages freedom, ownership, and exploration in a digital space, and cPanel is completely transportable when students are graduating and ready to leave the institution.


WordPress Multisite:
WordPress Multisite offers the ability to run many WordPress sites in a single install. This means that WPMS Administrators can oversee a network of hundreds (or even thousands) of WordPress sites from a single dashboard. Network settings allow admins to pre-approve themes and plugins that users have access to. As with Domain of One’s Own, users can log into a WordPress Multisite homepage with their campus credentials via Single Sign On, and be up and running with a WordPress sub-site in no time. WordPress Multisites work well for showcasing work in ePorfolios, blogs, and course sites.

Both DoOO and WPMS have pros and cons when thinking about onboarding, supporting, and offboarding a higher ed community. For example: Domain of One’s Own, while offering a perfect sandbox to build and explore, might feel overwhelming for beginner users. In some instances, it can even be a bit overkill to offer a full-blown cPanel account to all end users that are only really looking for a simple WordPress site. On the other side of the coin, WordPress Multisite might be a perfect fit for beginners that are dipping their toes in building a digital presence for the first time. That said, end users are only able to build and explore with the plugins and themes that have been made available to them. And if not regularly maintained, that growing list of plugins and themes can become overwhelming for administrators to maintain.

Sustainable growth and account cleanup also have to be considered with working with DoOO & WPMS. We encourage schools with Domain of One’s Own programs to regularly cull through accounts and clear out those that are no longer in use, given DoOO is charged on a per/cPanel basis. By comparison, WordPress Multisite hosting costs are entirely based on server storage and resources, reducing the need to closely watch the number of active users. When it comes time to clean off or remove accounts, cPanel has a built-in migration path, whereas converting a sub-site to a single WP instance can be quite manual.

These are just some of the considerations when thinking about running DoOO and WPMS programs on campus. But by taking the time to understand the value of both, you can further understand what will make the most sense for your community. And for some schools, the answer is clear: both are necessary.

Coventry Domains

I’ve admired the work that Coventry University has done with their Domain of One’s Own program for years, and in fact, I wrote here about their DoOO knowledge base, coventry.domains/learn. I recommend checking it out, as it does an amazing job of bringing beginners up to speed with best practices on the web. Now many years later, coventry.domains incorporates a larger mission around working with Domains in general– both in DoOO and WPMS.

Coventry.domains is now a landing page that delivers a larger “domains” idea, and the opportunities are framed differently for students and educators. Prominent login & signup buttons encourage folks to start by building an online presence with a WordPress Multisite sub-site, which is completely self-service. Alternately, users have the ability to request a Domain of One’s Own cPanel account. This strategy pushes most growth to the WPMS and allows admins to go through a vetting process for anyone interested in working with cPanel.

Domain Structures

OU Create

Similarly, Oklahoma University recently launched their own landing page for Domain of One’s Own & WordPress Multisite at create.ou.edu. The homepage promotes information literacy, digital citizenship, and skills development. Like Coventry, the folks at OU have also chosen to drive most traffic to the WPMS via self-service login buttons, whereas users must request a DoOO cPanel account.

Domain Structures:

I love how OU Create makes use of a .com top level domain as well as .edu URLs for managing their Domains program.

So where do we go from here?

In both examples above, I really like that the “integration” between DoOO & WPMS is not overly complicated. These schools are using a simple landing page with menu links to redirect traffic to one platform or the other based on the goals for each project. By offering both services, admins can be quite strict about what plugins & themes are supported in WPMS, allowing the curated list to be small and maintainable. If users then want to work with a different theme or plugin, they might be a good candidate for a cPanel environment. This also naturally begins to define where and how support is provided. (i.e. Here’s what we can offer vs. here’s what we can support in house.) There’s no doubt that these tools are powerful, and that’s made even more clear when they are running parallel to each other. DoOO programs are able to have intentional, steady growth, and legacy WPMS instances are given a fresh purpose.

One of my goals for Reclaim Hosting would be to help make the marriage of DoOO and WPMS a little bit easier. Can we build on stateu.org demo DoOO theme to incorporate more templates for these landing pages? Can we have a similar demo theme for WordPress Multisites? And even more, how can we incorporate Reclaim Cloud for those looking for a sandbox space outside of the LAMP stack? (This also gets back to the idea of tiered/layered services, which I wrote more about here.) I’m excited to continue tackling these questions, and look forward to hearing how others are doing the same.

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Price Changes for Domain of One’s Own https://www.reclaimhosting.com/price-changes-for-domain-of-ones-own/ https://www.reclaimhosting.com/price-changes-for-domain-of-ones-own/#respond Wed, 29 Jun 2022 15:55:57 +0000 https://www.reclaimhosting.com/?p=37624 Continue reading "Price Changes for Domain of One’s Own"

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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 growing costs of software licensing and server infrastructure. We have happily absorbed these external cost increases since 2015, when our pricing model for DoOO was last updated. But seven years ago support for DoOO looked a bit different: our scrappy team of three (yes, three people!) offered significantly less in-house support expertise, training and documentation materials, as well as limited community assistance. Over the last year we’ve also been doubling-down on community outreach and regular, targeted events. In fact, starting in 2023 we’re excited to include the following:

  • Continual growth of our in-depth documentation, training materials, open workshop curriculum, as well as “starter pack” resource for new admins
  • Institutional partnerships within our EdTech community.
  • Continued improvements to the DoOO backend interface, including starting development of the Domains API.
  • Increased malware monitoring and more regular scans
  • An elegant alternative to administrator access at the root server level

With the above updates and improvements (which we will continue to outline in future announcements) the cost of Domain of One’s Own will change from $6,000/year to $7,500/year for 500 cPanel accounts. This effectively means that cPanel accounts will be $1.25/month per account instead of the previous $1/month. You can find a full breakdown of cost changes below:

DoOO Cost Table

^Click image to magnify.

Timelines for Price Changes:

New DoOO schools can expect price changes to begin on January 1, 2023. Old pricing will be observed through the end of 2022, and schools will have the option to lock in these costs for subsequent years up front in multi-year contracts.

Existing DoOO schools can expect these price changes to begin on August 1, 2023. Old pricing will be observed through July 31, 2023, and schools will have the option to renew early or lock in these costs for subsequent years up front in multi-year contracts.

Please contact us if you have any questions or concerns.

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Thank You, BYU Domains https://laurenhanks.com/thank-you-byu-domains/ Mon, 24 Jan 2022 20:34:27 +0000 https://laurenhanks.com/?p=5183 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:

  1. BYU Domains to Reclaim Hosting: Everything you need to know
  2. BYU Domains to Reclaim Hosting: Logging In/Resetting your Password
  3. 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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Managing Multiple DoOO Servers https://laurenhanks.com/managing-multiple-dooo-servers/ Wed, 12 Jan 2022 14:03:04 +0000 https://laurenhanks.com/?p=5152 So your Domain of One’s Own project is growing, and you just had another server added. Now what? Honestly, not much will change to the day-to-day function of your Domain of One’s Own system.

For Reclaim Hosting we will work to configure the additional server to with your DoOO system behind the scenes, and we’ll be making sure that this server is monitored, maintained, and backing up as normal.

For DoOO Admins this means that any work you do to one server will need to be duplicated on the other. Keep reading to understand what might change.

For DoOO End Users there will be no changes to the sign up/account creation process. New accounts will exist on the newer server, meaning that DNS information would be different, but that won’t necessarily be a ‘change’ for the users themselves.

Finding Accounts

New signups will likely be pushed to your second/newer server for a while. Once the newer server fills up and is about as large as your first server, new signups will be automatically placed on the server with the least amount of accounts. This means that it will still be important overtime to continue cleaning off accounts, even though you have a new server for additional growth.

Since your accounts can now be in different locations, it’s important to know how to find them. The first place would be in the WHMCS Client Profile > Products/Services tab > Server field:

In case, for whatever reason, the system is out of sync and you need to check using an alternative route, you can always look at the DNS for the account domain. Let’s use lauren.reclaim.hosting has an example. Head over to whatsmydns.net and search the A record for the domain:

The IP address returned is 167.99.39.236.  We can now copy & paste the IP, and then search it in MXToolbox’s Reverse IP Lookup

Based on the screenshot above, we can gather that the IP address is associated with the server, Fugazi, so that’s where lauren.reclaim.hosting lives. (Psst, we have larger guides about all things DNS & DNS Tools if you’re interested in reading more.)

Server/cPanel Adjustments

In general, the biggest takeaway for managing multiple DoOO servers would be this: Whatever you do to server 1, you must also replicate on server 2. Any configurations, changes or tweaks must be duplicated on both servers given the two servers are not synced. Reclaim Hosting can help make these adjustments as well, just let us know!

Main Domain of One’s Own areas that tend to have adjustments:

Additional Reading

Transferring Accounts between Servers

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IndieWebCamp: Domain of One’s Own Meetup https://bavatuesdays.com/indiewebcamp-domain-of-ones-own-meetup/ Sat, 26 Sep 2020 15:54:10 +0000 https://bavatuesdays.com/?p=24373 Continue reading ]]>

This past Tuesday I attended the second Indie WebCamp generously hosted by Chris Aldrich focused on Domain of One’s Own. The format is a more focused 10-15 minute talk around a specific technology, in this meeting Tim gave folks a walk-though of Reclaim Cloud, and then opens up to the 21 attendees for anyone to share something they are working on. Tim shared the Cloud, and not only was I thrilled to see Jon Udell in attendance, but it’s always nice when one of your tech heroes tweets some love for your new project. Even better when you know they’re not one to offer empty interest and/or praise. Thanks Jon!

It was also very cool to read Will Monroe write-up of the session, and like him I found it a “very friendly group” and I realized while attending that this kind of low-key chatting and sharing is one of the things I have missed these days. Folks like Will who want to explore what’s possible in their classroom with Domains and beyond is a big part of what I miss about the day-to-day work of an edtech in an institution. And while I’m not necessarily chomping at the bit jump back into that game given the current circumstances, the ability to share and chat with folks who are interested in Domains is always a welcome opportunity.

During the sharing portion of the meetup Jean Macdonald, community manager at mico.blog, turned me on to the Sunlit project while I was bemoaning the dearth of open source alternatives to photo sharing apps like Instagram. Soon after I finally took the leap and signed up for a mico.blog to explore that platform. That platform has been a indieweb cornerstone for many folks I respect like John Johnston, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, and Dan Cohen to name just a few. So I wrote my first post:

What was even cooler was the fact that while writing this post I logged back into micro.blog and discovered a few folks had welcomed me to the micro.blog community, including Jean Macdonald and Dan Cohen—that makes all the difference.

I’m sold, so the IndieWeb meetup was a total win for me, and I look forward to the one next month. I am going to start getting serious about headless WordPress development for my new website at jimgroom.net, inspired by Tom Woodward’s talk for #HeyPresstoConf20

So, I’ll have something to share in my journey to learn WordPress headless, which will mean learning javascript, CSS, and some other insanity I am not entirely ready for. I have to give a special thanks to Chris Aldrich for putting this together and working to create a space to talk Domain of One’s Own within the IndieWeb community, and I know Greg McVerry has been pushing hard on this for a while now as well, so it is very much appreciated!

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Plugin Review: Ultimate Dashboard https://labrumfield.com/plugin-review-ultimate-dashboard/ Thu, 30 Jul 2020 19:03:28 +0000 https://labrumfield.com/?p=4701 Read More »Plugin Review: Ultimate Dashboard]]> Ok, folks- I’m pretty jazzed about a new plugin that I came across just this afternoon that I really think could change the game for #DoOO SPLOT/Site Template Builders and WordPress Multisite Administrators. My research for something like this began from an email I received from Coventry University asking about the extent that we could generate “getting started” language within new sub-sites of a WordPress Multisite. Coventry Admins were looking for ways in which they could guide beginner users, encourage them to build an “About Me” page as part of a larger Portfolio, and simply offer additional resources as users begin to settle into their new site.

The plugin I found is called Ultimate Dashboard and, as the title suggests, it allows you to customize and simplify your WordPress dashboard. There’s a free and a pro version, and quite a bit can be done with the free version. Check it out:

What I first see when installing WordPress-

What I see after playing with Ultimate Dashboard for a few minutes-

^ To Summarize the above, I was able to:

  • Remove the “Screen Options” and “Help” tabs from top right
  • Add a StateU Support admin page to the left dashboard menu bar and order it in the list
  • Completely remove existing WP Dashboard widgets
  • Create my own WP Dashboard widgets and order them
  • Alter the footer language

I’ll explain the steps I took below, but I was shocked with how simple and intuitive it was. Also, its pretty cool that you’re able to do so much with the free version alone.


How to Remove “Screen Options” and “Help” Tabs

Go to Ultimate Dashboard > Settings and check Remove Help Tab and Remove Screen Options Tab. Done. (On this page I also have the option to rename the Dashboard to something else, but I decided to keep it the same since any and all WordPress documentation will refer to it as a Dashboard.


Add a StateU Support admin page

Go to Ultimate Dashboard > Admin Pages and click Add New. Next you can begin adding in your content like any other WordPress post or page. I’m able to embed videos, add in images, headers, etc. I also set this as a Top Level Menu item, but it can be added as a submenu item to any parent menu item as well. Finally, I assigned it the #2 order so it would show up right underneath the Dashboard in the sidebar. I was able to customize the menu icon as well:


Removing Existing WordPress Dashboard Widgets

Go to Ultimate Dashboard > Settings and check All next to Remove All Widgets. The Pro version of this plugin allows you to easily remove third party plugin widgets (things like Elementor, Google Analytics, WooCommerce, etc) as well. However to work around this I quickly reenabled the ‘Screen Options’ tab, unchecked third party widgets there, and disabled the Screen Options tab again. Ha!


Creating my own Dashboard Widgets

Here’s where it really started getting fun. Ultimate Dashboard allows you to create three different types of Dashboard widgets with the free version: Text, Icon, and HTML. I tested all 3 and they’re beautiful!

Text Widget

Go to Ultimate Dashboard > Add New. Give your Widget a title, choose the Text Widget Type, add in your content and click Update. At the bottom you also have the option to set a fixed height, which may be recommended if you’ve got quite a bit of text.

Icon Widget

Go to Ultimate Dashboard > Add New. Give your Widget a title, choose the Icon Widget Type, and select the icon that you want to use. From there you can add in extra text that will fade in when you hover your mouse over the top right-hand question mark. The bottom field allows you to add a clickthrough URL for the widget. In this case I used a relative WordPress URL that points the user back to their individual ‘Add New Page’ section of the dashboard. (So cool!) Finally, click Update.

On my dashboard I also created another Icon Widget with an external link. So for example if you’ve got a class site or suite of resources that live outside of the WordPress instance that you want to point folks to, this works great.

HTML Widget

The final widget type works well if you quickly want to embed something without messing with formatting. Go to Ultimate Dashboard > Add New. Give your Widget a title, choose the HTML Widget Type, and paste in your HTML code:

The Pro version of this plugin has actual Video and Contact form widget types, but doing this through HTML is another great workaround.


Altering the footer language

Lastly, the Ultimate Dashboard plugin allows you to alter footer language in the dashboard from something like this:

…to this:

To do this, all you’ll need to do is go to Ultimate Dashboard > White Label and add in your own content to the Footer and Version Text fields.

The Pro version of the plugin way more customization options to allow you to brand the dashboard even further, which may be worth it for a large WordPress Multisite. But for admins that are looking to simplify the WordPress dashboard or offer guidance to new users in a Site Template, the free version may be all you need.


If anyone ends up using this plugin, please let me know! I’d be curious to see how you adopt it for your community.

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Filtering Alias Email Notifications into Slack https://labrumfield.com/filtering-alias-email-notifications-into-slack/ Wed, 15 Apr 2020 12:35:25 +0000 https://labrumfield.com/?p=4463 Ok, today I set out to revamp Sales team notifications for our reseller registrars. I’ll be documenting as I go, but will first share a little back story: We have some Domain of One’s Own schools that register Top Level domains for all of their users, so keeping those domains separate from shared hosting and consolidated in their own reseller registrar account is crucial. But as you could imagine, we’ve...]]>

Ok, today I set out to revamp Sales team notifications for our reseller registrars. I’ll be documenting as I go, but will first share a little back story:

We have some Domain of One’s Own schools that register Top Level domains for all of their users, so keeping those domains separate from shared hosting and consolidated in their own reseller registrar account is crucial. But as you could imagine, we’ve got a handful of these reseller accounts to monitor, and all of these accounts have their own thresholds for funds. It’s important that we keep a solid buffer of funds in each account so X number of domain renewals and registrations can be handled on a given day.

Coming back to the notifications. Our registrar, Logicboxes, will send out email notifications when funds reach a certain threshold within each reseller account. Which sounds simple enough, right? I wish! Unfortunately the email address for these notifications is also the standard billing email address, so changing it to a personal email isn’t really possible. And to make matters worse, the email address is LOUD. So loud, in fact, that we avoid checking the inbox all together and have instead resorted to manually checking reseller account funds daily.

This works fine, but I don’t like it. Manually checking makes way for human error (who is checking what? where’s the communication around the work? what if someone forgets?) and it’s definitely not scalable if we bring in new employees or take on additional reseller accounts.

I should also mention that each reseller account has their own custom email address (school@reclaimhosting.com) which acts as an alias for our catch-all email address, info@reclaimhosting.com.

My idea here was to create a sales@reclaimhosting.com email account and begin routing some of these sales-related emails out of the catch-all info@reclaimhosting.com account and into their own inbox. (I’ve wanted to do this anyway for a while now.) From there, I want to filter/forward useful notifications (like the funds threshold notice) into our designated #sales slack channel. I don’t expect doing this will eliminate the desire to manually check on reseller accounts, but I’m hoping that it will create a failsafe and centralized space to talk about the work that’s happening.


Creating a Sales Email & Setting up Alias Accounts

Reclaim Hosting runs mail though GSuite, so I started first by creating a new email account for sales@reclaimhosting.com. I had to remove the original sales@ alias first.

Next, I moved over all school@reclaimhosting.com aliases that were originally sitting on info@reclaimhosting.com. GSuite has a guide here if you’re interested.

Before doing anything else, I tested to make sure the aliases were working properly by sending an email from my personal email to school@reclaimhosting.com. It worked pretty immediately:


Setting up the Email App with Slack

Before connecting any email to Slack, I needed to first figure out what the ‘low funds in reseller account’ email notification looked like. To essentially generate the notification, I checked on the funds we had our reseller accounts, and then changed the threshold settings to a dollar less than that.

While waiting on those notifications to come through, I set up the forwarding email address in Slack. Using this guide, I went with the option to “Connect the Email app to your Workspace” because I wanted to have the option to choose which emails were being sent; I didn’t want to route the entire inbox into Slack.

Next, I chose the #sales channel since that’s where I want the notifications to arrive:

I went through integration settings, taking note of the custom email address that slack generated for me. That’s what I’ll use when filtering/forwarding specific ‘low funds’ emails.

After saving my settings, I tested the integration in Slack by sending a test email from my personal inbox to the custom address that the Slack Email App gave me:

The notification showed up beautifully in the #sales channel! By the way, I love that Slack allows you to upload a favicon and really customize how the notification comes in.

Defining Email Filters

The final piece was obviously to make sure that the proper notifications were being filtered into Slack. I didn’t want every email from sales@reclaimhosting.com coming into our #sales channel, just the ‘low funds’ notification. First, I set up my email forwarder in Gmail under Settings > Forwarding and POP/IMAP:

In this step you’ll have to confirm the forwarder email address with a confirmation code, but that wasn’t a problem since I previously tested the connection and the code came directly into Slack. From there I made sure the forwarder was disabled for the time being.

Next, I set up my filter rules in Gmail using this guide. By now I had received the ‘Low Funds’ notification from Logicboxes based on my new threshold settings so I was able to click filter messages like this next to the email:

I added in my simple filter settings (the Logicboxes email is actually coming from support@reclaimhosting.com) and clicked Create Filter:

On the following window, I gave it a quick Label, selected my forwarding address from the dropdown field, and then clicked Create Filter:

^I created a filter like this for each “school@reclaimhosting.com” email address.

The next ‘Low Funds’ notification came directly in the #sales Slack channel as planned. Woo!

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