Company – Reclaim Hosting https://www.reclaimhosting.com Take Control of your Digital Identity Thu, 20 Apr 2023 21:11:17 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.4 https://www.reclaimhosting.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/RHprofilelogo-100x100.png Company – Reclaim Hosting https://www.reclaimhosting.com 32 32 Reclaim EdTech, Year Two https://www.reclaimhosting.com/reclaim-edtech-year-two/ https://www.reclaimhosting.com/reclaim-edtech-year-two/#respond Thu, 20 Apr 2023 21:11:17 +0000 https://www.reclaimhosting.com/?p=39816 Continue reading "Reclaim EdTech, Year Two"

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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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9 Years of Reclaim Hosting https://bavatuesdays.com/9-years-of-reclaim-hosting/ Mon, 25 Jul 2022 12:50:50 +0000 https://bavatuesdays.com/?p=26815 Continue reading ]]>

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 28th of July (which Gusto—our payroll/hr service—notes as my anniversary) and the 23rd—the date I traditionally associated with it in celebratory posts over the years like this one. So I guess am going to make 23rd the formation date and the 28th my first day of work 🙂

Nine years. Crazy to think we are approaching a decade of Reclaim. I mentioned in the 7 year post how Reclaim was 1) growing and starting to dial in a more definitive sense of culture, and 2) imagining a reality where Tim and I were not as central as we had been to start.

Image Image of TV with Reclaim EdTech on screenTo the first point, I think our hires in 2021 and 2022 have really solidified the questions around culture, which have been to intentionally build a team that is rooted in a support mind-set that is informed and reinforced by educational technology. It helps that Goutam, Pilot, Taylor, and Amanda all came from Domain of One’s Own programs, there understanding of higher education and a deep commitment to vision of technology to both augment and transform education is foundational to being able to both dream up and roll-out an Instructional Technology team in a few short months to start 2022. That has been a gigantic shift in Reclaim’s understanding of itself, that said what it means more specifically is still yet to be determined—which makes it that much more fun! It’s a moment where we can explore, experiment, and figure it out, which i believe is a sandbox for all kinds of magical possibilities.

As to Reclaim operating without Tim and I as central, this has been sealed over the course of our ninth year. If you told me a year ago that Tim would be entirely removed from the day-to-day of Reclaim Hosting starting January 2022, I would’ve laughed …. nervously. But that has been the case, between Lauren ruling the Director of Operations position like a boss; Chris taking over infrastructure and truly shining through not only adroitly managing a mighty fleet of servers—but also making them that much more secure; and Meredith stepping up big time on the regular to train everyone on our team to become fluent in frontline support; we’ve all gotten better as a result. And while Tim’s creative innovation at Reclaim is legend, we now have nine well-rounded team members that truly do make Reclaim bigger than either of its founders, and that’s the dream.

As for me, I’m not going anywhere cause Tim now owns the amazing Reclaim Arcade, so Hosting is all I got! It does help that I love it, and I want to keep experimenting with what a marriage of hosting, support, and edtech looks like as we continue on this journey. In this regard, I have to say our ninth birthday marks a moment where we can not only sustain the laser-focused support our community has come to expect, but also provide a broader outreach thanks to Taylor’s community work and Pilot’s Roundup newsletters—we’re now able to think beyond the immediate. This means building on experiments like the OERxDOmains21 conference delivery platform for ongoing professional development (thanks to Tom Woodward and Michael Branson Smith); more experimentation with container-based edtech; as well thinking through how Domain of One’s Own, WordPress Multisite, and Reclaim Cloud represent a multi-level offering for schools to provide a wide range of options as part of our services—all of which remains undergirded by edtech-drive support.

So, as I reflect on our ninth year of Reclaim Hosting I believe we are entering a new phase wherein we have the headspace to experiment more, re-think how all our seemingly unrelated products can be understood as part of a greater whole, all while creating a culture of the possible at Reclaim Hosting that understands educational technology need not be a clarion call for the apocalypse, but an imaginative way to build cool, fun things that make a difference on a human scale. I’ll take nine more years of that!

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Reclaim Hosting featured on Hosting Advice https://laurenhanks.com/reclaim-hosting-featured-on-hosting-advice/ Wed, 06 Oct 2021 16:05:44 +0000 https://laurenhanks.com/?p=5087 In April 2016 I posted about a featured article on HostingAdvice about Reclaim Hosting. Today I’m delighted to share the same news:

This article dives into Reclaim Hosting core beliefs, thoughts about current hosting trends, and how we are navigating the “pay-as-you-go” pricing model. Read below:

Reclaim Hosting Brings Schools and Institutions Flexible Hosting, Managed Infrastructure, and Cloud Services

HostingAdvice.com

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Reclaim Hosting Turns 8 https://bavatuesdays.com/reclaim-hosting-turns-8/ Sat, 31 Jul 2021 17:13:04 +0000 https://bavatuesdays.com/?p=25394 Continue reading ]]>

Happy 8th Birthday to our dear @ReclaimHosting! ??

— Lauren Hanks (@brumface) July 23, 2021

Little note here on the bavablog to recognize that last week Reclaim Hosting turned 8 years old. Seems like just yesterday I was blogging about Reclaim turning 4 from a small airport in Wagga Wagga.

Reclaim Turns 4

It’s interesting too, because 4 years ago was when Lauren went full time and we brought on Meredith. Now both of them have become integral figures in the Reclaim Hosting story. I also noted in that post that we just opened CoWork, and it just so happens that the ashes of CoWork became Reclaim Arcade this year. What’s more, the company doubled from 4 to 8 people since 2017, and we’re hopefully going to hire two more folks this month.

Growth has been slow and steady, and sometimes harder than we’d like, but there is not one thing I would do differently about this amazing little corner of the indie edtech web. I both believe in and love the work we do. I also love the community we remain a proud  part of. And, most importantly, my co-workers rule the school. Still happy and determined after all these years, and that is enough.

A few highlights for me from year 8 was working with Maren Deepwell and the ALT crew to put on OERxDomains21. We followed that up with the virtual Reclaim Roadshow which allowed us to reconnect with admins in a fairly compelling virtual format, piggybacking on the work Michael Branson Smith, Tom Woodward, and Lauren Hanks did for OERxDomains21. Year 8 was also big for Reclaim Hosting in that we launched Reclaim Cloud last August, and a year later we have over a quarter of our infrastructure on it—that is something!

In January we brought on new team member Paul Jova and he has been amazing, as has our veteran support agent Gordon Hawley who has been with us for just over 18 months. I should also note Chris Blankenship continues to take on more of a central role in our infrastructure group, and there’s not enough space in this blog for me to sing all his praises. One of the coolest things I have experienced being part of Reclaim is watching folks like Lauren, Meredith, and Chris really come into their own and build a professional identity atop the bedrock of their amazing daily work. I am in awe, and there is no way Reclaim Hosting would look so good at 8 years old without them.

And of course there is the inimitable Timmmmyboy, who has taken the passion and energy he brought to Reclaim Hosting to conjure something from nothing into making Reclaim Arcade the absolute darling of retro arcades. All while setting up Reclaim Cloud, migrating infrastructure, and juggling support and infrastructure for most of this year. Tim has been an absolutely amazing partner these past 8 years, and I think that has been THE key to us being stable and even prosperous during these uncertain times.

There has been some real reward knowing that we have remained scrappy, small, and focused throughout our short history, and we remain masters of our own domain. No selling out here, we still believe the web you create is the coolest learning management system around. So, here’s to at least 8 more years of awesome!

And to help celebrate, you can now get your own Reclaim Hosting swag at out slick new shop, just another thing Lauren did off the side of her desk. #sogood

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Reclaim Hosting’s Lucky 7 https://bavatuesdays.com/reclaim-hostings-lucky-7/ Sat, 11 Jul 2020 08:28:28 +0000 https://bavatuesdays.com/?p=23920 Continue reading ]]> I will have more to say about the fact that Reclaim Hosting turns seven years old later this month, but that will most likely be linked with the official launch of Reclaim Cloud—the existence of which testifies there’s no seven-year itch in this professional relationship. But rather than talking about the Cloud, which has taken up much of the oxygen on this blog for the last couple of months, I wanted to just take a moment and recognize how unbelievably grateful I am that this crazy idea born off the side of our desks in 2013 has developed into such a solid and rewarding way of life.

What’s more, this year has been the first time Tim and I have been able to pull our heads out of the day-to-day work of answering tickets, onboarding new clients, and managing the servers in the engine room : ) It’s a lot of balls to juggle for a small team of just seven full-time employees—all of whom regularly punch above their weight and repeatedly prove just how lucky we are to work with them. In fact, I was just reading a support ticket review for Meredith that said this:

Meredith was great about helping me out …. your company is fortunate to have such a dedicated employee, and I would hope you would make it a point to compliment her!

Well, consider this post a long overdue point to compliment Meredith, whose moved into the role of Customer Support Manager and has adeptly taken over the management of our world class  support team.

But why stop there? Lauren Brumfield has taken over our sales division and is running that as brilliantly as everything else she has done at Reclaim for the last 5 years. That’s right 5 YEARS!

We also brought on few new full-time employees on over the last year, Chris Blankenship started part-time over a year ago and not only has he proven a quick study on support, but in September he became the first full-time hire to work in our newly formed infrastructure division, and he has surpassed all our expectations as a sysadmin and has given Tim some long overdue relief.

We hired Gordon Hawley in late fall as a part-time support specialist, and we could not make him full-time fast enough. he is an absolute workhorse, and his years of experience in the field meant he could dive right in on just about anything that came his way when it comes to domain management or cPanel.

And in May, our intern Katie Hartraft became a newly minted UMW graduate that defied all COVID-19 odds and transitioned immediately into a full-time role splitting time between support specialist and account manager. Katie has been nothing short of brilliant in both support and sales, and I have been blown away at how quickly she has come up to speed on two distinct yet equally complex facets of Reclaim’s day-to-day: support and sales.

The evidence our team is really beginning to congeal and take shape in the most impressive of ways is everywhere apparent. And as this post suggests, we’re starting to naturally break into distinct divisions: support, infrastructure, and sales.*  With this shift the need for more intentional organizational frameworks to ensure the three divisions are communicating becomes essential, and luckily Lauren has been taking on that overarching role for us as Director of Operations for more than a year now. We are starting to build in processes to ensure each of these three areas have clear workflows, documentation, and redundancy internally and externally. In fact, operationalizing Reclaim has given us the confidence to take on entirely new projects like Reclaim Cloud, and that is a direct result of the amazing people who work with us.

I am proud to be a Reclaimer, and building this team has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my professional life and I really feel like it’s only just begun. Avanti!

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*Although that last one, “sales,” could be deceiving given we often do not sell in the traditional “there’s a virus, use our tech to disrupt higher ed even further” kinda way, but rather respond to interest and help institutional and individuals get up and running and quickly and painlessly as possible. Not to mention the policy and legal implications of running this service for a campus. Turns out we have a growing list of folks that we need to make sure are getting the services and support they need on the regular.

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Reclaim Hosting Interview with Website Planet https://bavatuesdays.com/reclaim-hosting-interview-with-website-planet/ Mon, 21 Oct 2019 12:01:01 +0000 http://bavatuesdays.com/?p=22671 Continue reading ]]> I was interviewed earlier this month about Reclaim Hosting for Website Planet by Gail Lobel Rand. Website Planet is site that provides information for folks who want to create a website, and they highlight and rate the various website builder services, web hosting services, logo design services, etc. with the idea of providing a it of a recommendation engine. Reclaim Hosting does no advertising and there was no pay-to-play going on here, so I figured why not do an interview and share the good word about the best little hosting company that could ?

Gail was great, and she was must interested in breaking down what hosting plans we offered for their readership. In the end, it turns out, most hosting company’s provide the same thing: either shared hosting and VPS hosting (both managed and unmanaged). We see no reason to do unmanaged VPS hosting given providers like Digital Ocean more than have that covered, so with us the options are pretty simple. The outlier offering is Domain of One’s Own, and that is a reality so specific to higher ed that I would be surprised if it resonates much beyond the educational world, but you never know.

I think Reclaim Hosting has survived (dare I say thrived :)) because we focus on a niche community whose specific needs are often not served by larger web hosting companies. What’s more, we understood higher ed and recognize pricing for students and faculty needs to be both transparent and affordable. I think I touch on all of this to some degree in the interview, but the thing that came out while talking with Gail was that Reclaim Hosting puts off a completely different vibe them most hosting companies. We have VHS tapes on our website rather than stock photos of server rooms, and we don’t play the death by 1,000 cuts up-sell game that so many hosting companies do. I also tried to throw some love to Alan Levine’s SPLOT work, CUNY’s Commons-in-a-Box, as well as some Omeka and Scalar plugs. In case it’s not clear from the article, we did not develop any of those apps, just helped with the Installatron installers.

Lastly, after getting asked to do something like this out of the blue, I begin to wonder if Reclaim Hosting is beginning to show up on folks’ radar outside the education sphere. Not sure about that, but if so it would be interesting to know why.

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Happy 6th Reclaim https://bavatuesdays.com/happy-6th-reclaim/ Tue, 23 Jul 2019 20:07:35 +0000 http://bavatuesdays.com/?p=22367 Continue reading ]]> Lauren reminded us this morning that today is officially the day Reclaim got started back in 2013. And with some quick math that makes us 6 years old. That is pretty damn exciting, as my new favorite GIF on the internet will demonstrate:

via GIPHY

I’ll have more to say anon, but savor the GIF because all my words will never be enough.

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Q&A with Reclaim Hosting CoFounders https://labrumfield.com/qa-with-reclaim-hosting-cofounders/ Thu, 02 May 2019 18:15:33 +0000 https://labrumfield.com/?p=4059 In the spirit of entering a hiring phase at Reclaim Hosting, I’ve been working closely with Judith to make sure our internal onboarding documentation is up to date. To help introduce the Reclaim CoFounders to new employees, especially our remote workers, we thought it would be fun to create a video in which I would interview Tim and Jim about the company history, their current roles, and where they think...]]>

In the spirit of entering a hiring phase at Reclaim Hosting, I’ve been working closely with Judith to make sure our internal onboarding documentation is up to date. To help introduce the Reclaim CoFounders to new employees, especially our remote workers, we thought it would be fun to create a video in which I would interview Tim and Jim about the company history, their current roles, and where they think Reclaim is headed. You can view this video on our Podcast page, or by watching the embedded version below. This is one of my favorite episodes yet, so if you can spare the 45 min, I highly recommend!

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Marking Time: 5 Years at Reclaim Hosting https://bavatuesdays.com/marking-time-5-years-at-reclaim-hosting/ Tue, 24 Jul 2018 07:32:39 +0000 http://bavatuesdays.com/?p=21292 Continue reading ]]>

It’s hard to believe, but yesterday was the fifth of what Tim and I are officially acknowledging as Reclaim Hosting‘s birthday. I always thought it was the 28th of July, but as I’ll talk about here soon, my memory is entirely unreliable. Reclaim is now 5 years old! That is crazy to me, it has been both very quick and at the same time seems like I have always been a Reclaimer. Time is wild, it’s been 13 years since I took a job at UMW as an instructional technologist, 10 years since EDUPUNK, 8 years since ds106, 6 years since our pilot of UMW Domains, 5 years since we created the best little hosting company around, and now almost 3 years since I followed Tim’s lead and went full time at Reclaim. I think a lot about time on this blog, in fact this blog (and my daddy blog before it) is in many ways dictated by a sense of tracking time and trying to record the quotidian things that would otherwise soon be forgotten by my increasingly porous memory. 

I like recalling the origin myth of Reclaim Hosting, because it makes me smile. I was coming off my lowest point personally; I finally quit drinking and committed to get my mental health in order—no small task for me—and few things could have been further from my mind than starting a company.  Tim and I toyed with striking out with the idea behind Reclaim Hosting in February (?) of 2013 after a trip to Emory University, but that discussion went dormant while we ramped up for the official launch of UMW Domains (which, as it would happen, we spent Reclaim’s fifth anniversary migrating UMW’s servers to Digital Ocean ? ). But once I returned from leave in the Summer of 2013 Tim approached me after his thankless vacation at the beach dealing with a Hippie Hosting server outage and, rather than throwing up his hands and jumping ship on the server admin life, he wanted to doubled down. He was like, “So, are you back or what?” [I had been mentally absent for a bit.] “Because I think we should start a company?” I was thinking to myself, “Wow, this guy is no joke, he means it?” I did think about stuff like going independent a lot, as most do, but rarely had I committed. But when I saw how serious Tim was and I knew what I knew about him, I immediately committed. That’s the power of Tim Owens. We decided on the name Reclaim Hosting, and that day (or a day later) we were heading to the county clerk’s office to become partners in a small venture that would literally make my life more a fairytale than the ongoing farce it had become ?

It happened really quick, I had a like $600 left over from the $5,000 Shuttleworth Grant David Wiley got me, and we used that to fund the first two or three months of a new server (clash.www.reclaimhosting.com) in order to run Reclaim Hosting in parallel with UMW Domains. We got some press immediately from the Chronicle, which jump-started interest by highlighting the fact we were offering folks a domain and web hosting for $12 a year. It was definitely an experiment, but the rush early on was a good sign we may be on to something. I remember the question we kept getting during those early days was will this continue beyond the year? And, we were pretty upfront that we did not know. We were transparent that if it did continue, we could not sustain it at $12 an account, and we would have to rethink pricing, etc. We had about $1400 in the bank in May 2014, which means we were running a profit of around $800—although neither of us were being paid by Reclaim. So whether we could sustain Reclaim was definitely a question mark, but that all changed when the University of Oklahoma reached out in June of 2014 for an institutional setup, then soon after Davidson College, CSU Channel islands, and Emory University—- the rest is history

We have operated in the black from day 1; we always had a straightforward business model; we do not prey on our customers with product up-selling or data siphoning; and we remain fiercely independent in that we owe no one nothing—there are no investors we  have to answer to, and when an IT department or security officers find themselves puffing up their chest and making things harder than necessary to enable academic technology, we can simply walk away. In fact, one could argue it is because of those people that we even exist! I am really proud of what we start, and in that 5 years we have doubled in size in terms of people, with Lauren Brumfield growing with us for over 3 years now, and Meredith Fierro filling out support for a year and a half. Growing is tricky, and we remain vigilant of the issues tied up with getting too big too fast and forgetting why we did this to begin with. But you know what, 5 years on not much has changed: our support remains consistently solid; our prices remain as affordable as ever; and our commitment to helping faculty and students explore the open web for teaching and learning is still unflagging. 

So, all this to say happy belated birthday, Reclaim Hosting, I remain a big fan! And, in honor of our fifth anniversary we’re resurrecting our first server, namely clash.www.reclaimhosting.com, which will truly mark the end of something, i.e., the migration of our last two Reliable Site servers on August 4th (beathap.www.reclaimhosting.com and joydiv.www.reclaimhosting.com) will mean all of our critical infrastructure is now on Digital Ocean. A project two years in the making—what did I say about tracking time on the blog? Making the myths one post at a time.

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Reclaim Interview at OER18 https://bavatuesdays.com/reclaim-interview-at-oer18/ Mon, 18 Jun 2018 05:24:52 +0000 http://bavatuesdays.com/?p=21177 Continue reading ]]>

I met the team of @ReclaimHosting for an interview on #DigitalLiteracy in the post-cambridge-analytica-era.
(PLEASE don’t tell anyone that there has been a rift in the space-time continuum at 8’45 of the video!)https://t.co/Q6Z5tcYDcM #OER18

— Jöran ? (@joeranEN) June 10, 2018

I will be catching up on a large number of posts over the next week before I head out for vacation, so the bava firehose is going to be set to full blast!

Kurt Angle Firehose GIF by WWE - Find & Share on GIPHY

One of the things I’ve wanted to share was the following video Jöran Muuß-Merholz recently published of his interview with Reclaim Hosting’s Meredith Fierro and Tim Owens about digital literacy before things take a bizarre turn back to the future of ed-tech.

It’s a solid 10 minute video highlighting a few of the reasons why framing one’s personal online presence around web hosting represents an important shift for higher ed from the various third party, data sucking services that everywhere monetize digital identity. And while I am admittedly biased about both the topic and the folks interviewed, I dig Jöran’s style. He’s an edtech consultant from Germany who really pushes to capture as much of the conversations happening around OER throughout Europe in a variety of media: his blog, podcasts, videos, Twitter, etc.  His intense work ethic and fun-loving spirit are integral to what makes him such a good interviewer, he has a way of getting you to open up and chat more freely. What’s more, he truly produces the media he creates, which takes a ton of time and energy to do right. The above video is a good example of this, he reached out to me during the process to secure a Reclaim Video TV image in order to use the screen to highlight the various topics discussed—which is a really nice touch.

Jöran is one of the many good folks that are thinking through the broad implications of open education for Germany as that country works towards a national policy for OER.* So, special thanks to him for taking the time to sit down with Reclaim at OER18, and helping to make us a small part of that very important conversation.


*Another person doing some important thinking is Christian Friedrich, whose recent post “Is open the new organic?” is well-worth your time.

 

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