Reclaim Hosting has been hosting VCU’s Ram Pages as of the beginning of the Spring semester. It reinforces for me there is nothing Tim Owens can’t do, another yet another example of the powerful ripple effects of #ds106 on edtech. We’ve been loath to proclaim victory too soon given what a beast Ram Pages is. And I thought we had a blogging revolution at UMW! In two short years Ram Pages has been home to over 16,000 blogs for 15,500 users. That’s nothing short of mind boggling. Tom Woodward—in his quiet, self-defacing way—has built and managed a blog empire at VCU’s ALT Lab, and over the last 6-8 months Tim and I have been trying to figure out how the hell we would migrate it cleanly given it can grow at intervals of 1000 users any given week.
We (royal for Tim) moved it over Christmas vacation on to a beefy Linode instance running Ubuntu, Varnish, and Nginx after sharding the database to 256. Yesterday we finally got the second backup solution working, which in addition to nightly snapshots we now have file-level, off-site backups through R1Soft Licenses (more on that in another post). This may be one of the largest, most active academic blogging systems in higher ed, and it is a real source of pride that we’re hosting it. And I saying this knowing full-well it is a total jinx [crosses fingers]….it’s been rock solid so far. Don’t ever question the power of Reclaiming!
I make no claim to understanding the technicalities here . But simply as a user, the switch to Reclaim has been a pleasure, with noticeably better speed in accessing the “beast,” as you put it.
And, yes, Tom is awesome.