Remember to Reclaim September

It’s been a month, the new semester is in full force and I am just coming up for some air. I’ve a bunch to share in more detail, but this post will be a bit of a summary of highlights to help me get get back in the groove (and doubling as a blog to-do list). So anyway, time to blog!

Thank you, Reclaim

Lauren Hanks has left the Reclaim building! After eight amazing years, Lauren is moving on and we’re thrilled for her and the new adventures that await. That said, anyone who knows Lauren understands how big a loss this is for Reclaim. She was old gold Reclaim through-and-through and her presence will be missed terribly. There’s more to say on this, but all I can say for now is thank you, Lauren, for showing up every day and ruling all.

ReclaimPress Logo

I think I’ve been using the development of a forthcoming product, ReclaimPress, as a way to avoid dealing with Lauren’s departure. Intense work cures many a woe, and ReclaimPress has been a lot of fun to play with.  In short, ReclaimPress is just WordPress. If you want to get up and running with a just WordPress without the overhead of cPanel, this is a great solution, and I think we can price it so that the costs are comparable with shared hosting. What’s more, from this space you can scale from hobby project to enterprise grade without ever moving your instance. Containerized WordPress hosting with a slick user interface is coming to Reclaim, and that is a beautiful thing.

Bryan Mathers Art for the Win!

And as always, we have Bryan Mathers doing his magic with the art. That needs to be its own post given it will help me flesh out ReclaimPress a bit better—as his art always does—so stay tuned for more.

ReclaimPress Dashboard

Part of how I play with any new platform we stand-up is moving as many of my own sites to the new space as possible. This helps me work out any kinks and generally get a sense of the experience we’re providing our community. So, as you might have guessed, this blog is now hosted on ReclaimPress, as is both ds106.us and daily.ds106.us. You can see from the image above I not only have this blog running in two regions (bavamulti-1 on the West Coast of the US and bavamulti-2 in Canada), but now ds106.us is also running as a multi-region—progress!

bryanmmathers.com was the first of the three to come over

After getting comfortable with my own sites in ReclaimPress, I started working with some select folks to help me test the new space. In particular, Bryan Mathers was intrigued while creating the art work, and he has a few sites running on our shared hosting that could use a performance boost. So, we moved them over to ReclaimPress and it seems to be a very good fit thus far, plus his sites are so beautiful!

The great Visual Thinkery site now hosted on ReclaimPress

One of his sites (ulster.visualthinkery.com) was using WooCommerce, and ReclaimPress has a special hosting package just for that plugin, so we tried that out as well, and by all reports it is doing the trick for his Ulster zine project, which is just another stroke of Mathers genius.

Bryan Mathers’s Zine project to focused art on Ulster

After figuring out those sites, we have started the process of moving larger managed WordPress instances from Reclaim Cloud to ReclaimPress, so things are in motion for sure.

National Geographic GIF featuring penguins migrating

In fact, a big focus for Reclaim Hosting this month has not only been on managing the September rush, but also getting a plan together for a bigger migration project of all of our servers off CentOS 7 to Ubuntu. A huge project for sure, but this month we’ve started to dig in our broader plan into action so we can start chipping away at the migrations each day, week, month for the next 11 months. When it’s done our entire infrastructure will be not only have been migrated, but also upgraded in the process. Many of which are security enhancements that will go a long way towards future-proofing our fleet.

There is a lot more on the Reclaim Hosting front for sure, but the above underscores how much of the  focus has been on ReclaimPress and our server migration project, not to mention beginning of the semester!