Zeit Here, Zeit Now: Watching the WWW Wake Up to Container Hosting

It was a pretty busy week at Reclaim Hosting, and I am up early on a Saturday morning working on the final migrations of our shared hosting infrastructure to Digital Ocean. Bye, bye ReliableSite! It has been a very productive summer when it comes to infrastructure, and folks are still reclaiming and domaining so no complaints from the bava. We also continue to make headway on Reclaim Today, our live video show highlighting stuff we’re interested in, working  on, dreaming about, etc. Yesterday’s episode was a 25 minute discussion about Now (which I keep calling Zeit Now because the domain is zeit.co/now) which is a hosting environment that makes it dead simple to host Docker containers on the web. We used the episode as an occasion to work through Now, and talk about our own dreams for container-based hosting at Reclaim. I discovered Now thanks to the following Tweet from ed-tech’s mole from the future, Tony Hirst:

ahem… @jimgroom… you looking for new hosting offerings for folk wanting to reclaim simple db/datasette api hosting…? https://t.co/8xNLKvWyEB

— Tony Hirst (@psychemedia) July 14, 2018

I then played with it briefly, but was fumbling around with Docker on my desktop and ran into issues get a Shiny server running. I abandoned the project, but this episode allowed me to get a clearer understanding of what Now can do, how it differs from Cloudron, and what it could mean from faculty, researchers, edtech, and students who want to spin up container -based apps on the quick.  I also liked this episode a lot because I think it encapsulates pretty well how Tim and I have been working together these last 7 or 8 years. It’s been such a fun and funny relationship in so many ways, and capturing some of that on Reclaim Today seems to be just one of many reasons it feels so good.