Lauren Brumfield already announced that we’re officially rolling out WordPress Multisite (WPMS) hosting at Reclaim. What’s more, she created an online calculator that provides transparent pricing going forward, which is a big part of why we’re finally announcing something we have done for years. While we’ve been pretty laser-focused on shared hosting and Domain of One’s Own for the last four years, we’ve still picked up more than a few WPMS instances. In fact, we jumped in at the deep-end of the pool when we started hosting the colossus that is VCU’s Rampages. As a result Tim was able to really fine-tune high demand WPMS environments like Rampages, and we’re in a situation where we can comfortably manage just about anything out there in higher ed.
It’s fun for me because I cut my teeth on WordPress Multiuser (even before it was multisite), and when Tim came onboard at UMW the first thing we asked him was how he felt about managing UMW Blogs. The rest is Reclaim history, he proved an insanely quick study and went from UMW Blogs to Hippie Hosting to Domain of One’s Own to Reclaim Hosting in two short years. That’s a resume!
back to the future, we really weren’t comfortable with announcing WPMS at Reclaim too early because we were experimenting with different setups across various data centers like AWS, Linode, and Digital Ocean, so things were always custom based on several factors which meant the pricing varied. But when Digital Ocean recently announced their new plans and pricing model, we were sure we had a solid setup through Digital Ocean that would allow us to stabilize our WPMS offerings as well as making them extremely competitive when it comes to pricing.
Before we could announce anything we had to reach out to all existing customers we and let them know of the new setup, for many of them this meant a significant savings. Once took care of that, we figured it was high time to officially announce that we are in the WPMS hosting business. So if you have a WPMS site you want to offload to external hosting, let’s talk. Pricing is simple: server, backups, and software licensing (Bitninja, cPanel, etc) at cost, whereas our monthly maintenance and management fees starts at $250 per month. This model finally allows us to decouple server and software costs from management demands, and establishes a baseline for what our time is worth to ensure you get the service we’re known for. It also makes clear that what you pay us for is not the hardware or software, but the peace of mind that tried and true experts are on the job. I mean let’s be honest here, this isn’t some hack outfit working from a ramshackle UMW office in duPont Hall trying to duct tape together some kind of chitty-chitty-bang-bang syndication solution, we’re professionals—and for that you must pay!
