Catching Up With Reclaim Hosting

I have been trying to capture as much of my latest stint back at Reclaim Hosting’s HQ as possible given it was so awesome. Everything from the Reclaim Video Grand Opening and Summer Movie Nights to a special visit from Michael Branson Smith to Centipede to the day-to-day video store awesomeness. That said, I have written little to nothing about the Reclaim Hosting core crew, although the goodness is everywhere apparent in my previous posts. But I imagine spelling that out a bit is never a bad thing. 

I wrote less than a year ago about our intention to build capacity at Reclaim, and I think this year we have definitely done that and more. We are a tight, streamlined crew of four, and while we could probably afford to grow over the coming year, we are holding off for the time being. We are all but done with our infrastructure migration to Digital Ocean—which has taken a fair amount of energy over the last year or so—and once we are finished that will be a major undertaking behind us. More than anything, Lauren and Meredith have been crucial to our steady growth and success, and we all agree it’s time for them to take on more responsibility and grow according to our needs. We did our yearly review while I was back, and it was a very good experience. We don’t pull any punches; we try and be honest about what is and isn’t working. I think that helps everyone know where they are at and what we need to be doing. It also helps that everyone starts from a basic level of intense badassery.

Tim and I run a pretty casual office environment overall, but there are extremely high expectations of support and responsiveness that has really set us apart, and it’s clear that everyone at Reclaim takes pride in that fact—not to mention how much the Reclaim Faithful appreciate it. That is not going away, but we did realize we might be able to organize that process a bit better, so we’ll be experimenting with that over the next few months.

Lauren has also been instrumental in thinking through how we can better attend to our Domain of One’s Own schools’ needs. She and I will be dividing up the account management and I’m really looking forward to this because I have no doubt the schools that run their hosting infrastructure through Reclaim will be the better for it. Lauren already talked about our clean-up and streamlining of this process, and there will be much more to come.

We also had the opportunity to dream about next steps for Reclaim Hosting’s Domain of One’s Own offering. Our vision is to free up Tim as much as possible this coming year to pursue a quite compelling vision he has mapped out for what the next generation of Domain of One’s Own might look like, and given the various requests we have been getting from schools, he may be on to something truly groundbreaking. It’s too early to over promise, but Domains 2.0 might be a big deal on the ed-tech internet 🙂

Also, the co-working space Reclaim Hosting works from and operates, CoWork, has been taking off as of late (another post I am piggy-backing on from Lauren). It was pretty packed during my time back, and folks are renting the various available spaces on the regular. It is rewarding to see CoWork begin to live up to its potential, and I think we may even consider overhauling the last untouched area as a kind of all-purpose incubator space that might second as a TV studio for a project I have burning a hole in my cerebellum.

In short, things have been super solid at Reclaim Hosting. It’s like running DTLT without all the meetings and institutional bullshit—I love it. Reclaim Hosting is now a team that I would put up against the best of ed-tech groups. We still have some growing to do, but our core is super tight, and we are #4life! I could not be happier with the chance Tim and I took on venturing out 3 years ago, and so much of that has to do with the slow, steady building of a group based on the basics: above-and-beyond support of and for faculty and students who need help exploring the web.