Reclaim Hosting needs your money!

A dapper Charles Ponzi šŸ™‚

Ok, here’s the situation, my parents went away on a week’s vacation Reclaim Hosting is pretty much rocking and rolling. We have an insane amount of interest, conservative estimates put us at about 3000 faculty and students already. What’s more, the infrastructure has been tested with some early lab rats, and it’s good to go. But there’s one small problem, we need money to front the cost of as many as 3000 domains.

What about the Shuttleworth FoundationĀ grant, you ask? A portion of thatĀ grant was used to setup the server, buy Ā WHMCS and Installatron, and provide a year’s worth of free hosting to participants in Reclaim Hosting. The remaining grant money won’t even begin to cover what we need for domains. Additionally, the plan was to use that money to develop the ds106 assignment bank as a WordPress plugin as well as to frame out the architecture of theĀ Reclaim Your Domain project. As of now, if 3000 people were to sign-up on, or soon after, August 15th (which is when we open sign-ups) we’d have to immediately front upwards of $30,000 in domain costs before that money could be reimbursed to us.

Fact is, Tim and I might be smart, attractive, and bad ass instructional technologists, but we’re far from rich. So, that’s why we are asking you. We are trying to borrow (this is a short-term loan, not a hand-out—though we aren’t against that either šŸ™‚ ) up to $30,000 so we can cover the demand we’re expecting in the first month. We have set up a campaign site for anyone interested in helping us get started, and we’ll track our progress there.

I’ve gone to the community well with this kind of thing before, so I wouldn’t be surprised if folks can’t or won’t do it again—no hard feelings. That said, this is a short-term loan for Reclaim Hosting so it can get up on its feet, and we have no interest pursuing funding that might compromise this project’s community focus. What’s more, you’ll get your money back no later than October 31st, 2013. If you interested, go here and give us a loan, hippies!

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4 Responses to Reclaim Hosting needs your money!

  1. So, a question (while I ponder loans and my summer bank balance) – is there any way that I can pay my domain registration fee in advance? A way to sign up and pay the fee but not expect my service to go live until the fees come through to you? Or does it help if we stagger sign-ups?

    • Reverend says:

      John,
      We can certainly do that, with this campaign we are trying to raise a good chunk so that if a number of students who signup all at once, which is what usually happens, can can cover a large sum of money for those domains. Does that make sense? What’s more, if you want to sign-up for your domain now, that would even be better. Go to http://portal.reclaimhosting.com

      Thanks, you rule!

  2. David says:

    Damn, wish that I were even sorta-moderately rich. If I weren’t currently scrounging to pay my electric bill, I would totally loan you a couple hundred dollars. šŸ™

  3. Reverend says:

    David,

    Dude, you were the inspiration behind this, that should be enough! What’s more, if we could pay our electric bills we wouldn’t be asking šŸ˜‰ This show will go on.

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