Full disclosure: I was not asked to write this post by any person or entity, nor did/will I receive any compensation for it. There are no affiliate links anywhere in this post.
I wanted to do a quick follow-up to this late paragraph from my last post a month ago:
I am intrigued by Reclaim Hosting, and plan to investigate them as an alternative to my current webhosting service – which I must confess has been quite satisfactory as far as customer service is concerned, but I like Reclaim’s connection to and roots in the education community. I am also drawn to supporting small businesses whenever possible (it also doesn’t hurt that Reclaim’s hosting package costs a fraction of what I currently pay), so this seems like a potential win-win.
Since then, I actually did reach out to Reclaim and set up an account for my webhosting and domain registration. To my great pleasure, the transfer of my website, blog, and associated self-hosted apps (as well as the Google Apps suite on my family domain) could not have been easier. Once the domains cleared my previous registrar for transfer (they have a five-day waiting period), Jim and Tim at RH did everything for me quickly and absolutely seamlessly. They also kept in touch with me throughout the process, and were extremely responsive when I ran into a glitch a few days later while playing with new subdomains and self-hosted apps.
While Reclaim provides large-scale managed software hosting and webhosting solutions aimed at institutions, they also offer smaller-scale domain registration and hosting packages aimed at individual and small-group users. Their Student/Individual package includes one free domain registration and 2GB of storage for $25 per year, and their Faculty & Organization package ups the storage to 10GB for $45 per year (additional domains are $12/year). Even with the more expensive package, that ends up working out to about $3.75/month. That’s not a promotional “starter” rate that will inflate after a few months; that’s just. the. rate. I think I paid something like four times that for my previous hosting package after the promo pricing expired. Add in Reclaim’s super-responsive customer service and it really was a no-brainer for me.
In keeping with the #ProjectReclaim theme, I would be remiss if I did not mention the variety of self-hosted apps you can auto-install directly through Installatron. Beside the usual suspects (WordPress, Drupal, MediaWiki) there are a ton of apps set up for 1-click install: blogging platforms to CMSs to bulletin boards to RSS and bookmarking apps, e-commerce, photo galleries… and not just one of each kind of app, either – most types of apps have several different specific applications to choose from. Reclaim’s app repository absolutely blows my previous Big Name Webhost’s list clean out of the water. It’s fun for me to play with some of these just as an individual user, but with Reclaim’s app selection, one could very realistically set up a self-hosted online portal for students and/or staff quite easily.
I can probably count on one hand (ok, maybe two) the number of posts I’ve written on this blog endorsing specific products or services in the last eight years, but my experience with Reclaim has been so positive that I felt I needed to give them a shout-out. If you’re looking to make the move to self-hosting your blog or website, or even if you’re an old hand but are looking to support a business that supports education, I urge you to give Reclaim Hosting a look.