This month we are running a series of free events, Reclaim’s Rewind 2024, to celebrate community, collaboration and our continued commitment to advocate for the open web in Higher Education and beyond.
Kicking off the festivities along with a bit of professional development inspiration is the
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This month we are running a series of free events, Reclaim’s Rewind 2024, to celebrate community, collaboration and our continued commitment to advocate for the open web in Higher Education and beyond.
Kicking off the festivities along with a bit of professional development inspiration is the small yet mighty team behind your favourite hosting service: this Friday we are getting together for a precious hour of reflection, celebrating some of our milestones of 2024.
Our year... in your words!
Like many in our community we have definitely felt the pace of work in Higher Ed gathering momentum... and times that used to be a little calmer are now just as busy. That leaves less time to take a step back and appreciate what's been achieved. When we finally did, we found incredible feedback! So here's a taste of what our work has achieved this year... in your words:
"Reclaim's tech support has no equal. ... the quick response was very much appreciated and the problem (entirely of my own making) was solved in a professional and courteous manner. Thanks!"
"... You are a miracle worker and you deserve the Worker of the Day Award!"
"Your technical support was exceptional!"
"I must say, whenever there is an issue, you guys do offer simply the best support—it is really appreciated!"
"I say it every year - but Reclaim Hosting is the one bill I don't mind paying. Still great value and even greater service."
Reclaim Rewind 2024: Live on Reclaim TV and Radio
Let’s Rewind 2024 together as you tune in and join the conversation.
December 6th @ 10:00 am - 11:00 am ET
It’s a Reclaim TV and Radio Special - with the team from Reclaim. We have had quite a year and our team is coming live on air to share some of the best bits of 2024, the drama that shook the (edtech) world and how we have come out fighting the good fight for indie edtech on the other side.
Event info
This is only the first of the events planned for this month. Join us as we take a step back and reflect on everything we have achieved in partnership with admin, faculty and students, to gather our strength and find some renewed inspiration before the new year starts. Full schedule:
]]>I started writing about running (or trying to run) a WordPress Multiregion (WPMR) instance of this blog in November of 2021. So over 3 years ago now.
Since then I’ve written eleven posts tagged wpmr that focus on various elements of setting up and running two constantly syncing instances of WordPress across different geographical locations on Reclaim Cloud to ensure 99.999999999999% uptime. If and when one region has down time (it’s really a matter of when not if), the instance will instantaneously failover to a different region that will be both readable and writable. In other words, zero downtime. When the offline version comes back online, any changes will be instantly synced so there’s no missing data between instances of WordPress. As already noted in one of my several posts on WPMR, bavatuesdays doesn’t need an always on failover setup like this—it’s a bit of overkill. That said, it’s nice 
While I do want to pretend my blog is indispensable every hour of every day 365 days a year, the real value is for a top-level .EDU, large instances of WordPress Multisite (WPMS), and/or other high-profile WordPress sites that just can’t go down.
A good part of 2022 was spent working with the Reclaim team to lock-in the WPMR offering, eventually getting it running for both Macalester College’s main .EDU, and soon after Trinity College—which was pretty awesome. As is always the case, this blog was used as a bit of a laboratory. It was a year-long odyssey in which I tried and re-tried to get all the pieces of WPMR working as expected, but the third time was truly a charm.
To run a WPMR for a top-level .EDU site, you need to control the DNS for the main domain. For most schools this would be impossible to provide a third-party like Reclaim given how much runs off that main domain, there’s no way they could point their nameservers to Reclaim Hosting. One way around this is to point just the www subdomain using CNAME flattening in Cloudflare. This allows us to manage only the www.yourschool.edu subdomain, while allowing the rest of the DNS to function apart from the instances we run at Reclaim. What’s more, once the DNS is pointed at Cloudflare we’re able to manage load balancing, caching, DDoS protection and more.
After we got Reclaim Hosting’s www.reclaimhosting.com running on a multiregion setup, Lauren, Chris, and I did a Reclaim Today episode wherein we discussed the process as we were preparing to go live with Macalester College’s main site just a month later. This was a pretty intense and deeply rewarding few months at Reclaim.
Soon after Macalester, we got Trinity College up and running on our multiregion setup, and both have been rock solid since (knock on the proverbial wood). It was also the inspiration to officially roll-out our ReclaimEDU services for schools that use WordPress and want to ensure their website doesn’t go down.
ReclaimEDU
In the spirit of experimentation, we continued to explore other DNS flattening services like EdgePort. While I loved that EdgePort could flatten any subdomain (or sub-subdomain) at a fraction of the cost of Cloudflare,* not to mention the built-in application delivery networks that ensured uptime even if both servers were down, in the end Cloudflare proved a much more stable option.
That brings us pretty much up to date. Looking back most of the WPMR development work was figured out in 2022. Two years later we’re currently going through a new round of WPMR for WPMS setups that offload media to S3 and are built on-top of sub-subdomain wildcard instances—introducing some complexity. The solution for wildcard sub-subdomains Chris worked out is pretty slick—but he’ll talk more about that on the blogosphere anon. I also have another post coming about a recent move of bavatuesdays’s WPMR back to Reclaim Cloud. I transferred it into a brand new multiregion using the Reclaim Cloud marketplace, and it was quite simple and included some new features. I’ll document how to get your own WPMR up and running in Reclaim Cloud shortly, as well as breaking down the specifics for setting up DNS and load balancing in Cloudflare. WPMR is the infrastructure blog gift that keeps on giving.
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*Cloudflare makes you go enterprise at the tune of several thousand dollars a month when you want to flatten a subdomain of a subdomain: something like blogs.baruch.cuny.edu or commons.gc.cuny.edu. We were trying to find workable options for our 2024 multi-region projects of CUNY Academic Commons and Blogs @ Baruch –we love you CUNY!
]]>This year has been a jam-packed one for Reclaim TV and in the spirit of Rewind 2024, we wanted to take a look at all the guests we had join us on our weekly Reclaim TV stream!
This week we're joined by Martin Hawksey to talk about building
This year has been a jam-packed one for Reclaim TV and in the spirit of Rewind 2024, we wanted to take a look at all the guests we had join us on our weekly Reclaim TV stream!
This week we're joined by Martin Hawksey to talk about building community through events, video content, and blogging!
In this episode of Reclaim Today Jim sits down with several scholars to discuss the embedded laws and public traces of racial exclusion in property rights across Northern Virginia. What's more, they have been exploring mapping tools to try and help visualize and understand the history of exclusion in NOVA and beyond.
Join Maren Deepwell and Anne-Marie Scott as they discuss the key considerations that need to be made when using open-source tools in key infrastructure!
Jim Groom and Paul Bond talk with Michael Branson Smith about how he built the Dr. Oblivion AI-driven bot for Oblivion University, part of this semester's ds106 course centered around Artificial Intelligence.
Amanda and Taylor sit down with Suzanne Norman of Simon Fraser University to chat about how her students get their own space online!
Join us as we chat with Quinn Dombrowski about the DH RPG!
We chat with Stephen Downes about him having moved some of his sites to Reclaim Cloud and what his experience has been!
We are joined by Mary Isbell to chat about how CBOX Openlab is used at the University of New Haven!
This week we’ll have some WordPress Multisite experimentation through the work at St Olaf. Bret Farley is joining us to talk through his exploration and customizations he and his team worked through to allow for St Olaf to create a custom WPMS instance for their school.
Join us as we chat with Amanda Licastro about the future of multidimensional scholarship!
How do you archive student work and institutional work? How do you archive work that doesn’t fit into the traditional boxes, like programming projects, video games, and mixed media presentations? Join us as we chat with Corinne Guimont and Alex Kinnaman from Virginia Tech about these questions and more!
It's been a jam packed year, but we're not quite done yet. Tune in next month for more:
Maren Deepwell
Join us for Reclaim’s Rewind 2024 to celebrate community, collaboration and our continued commitment to advocate for the open web in Higher Education and beyond. This December we are taking to the airwaves, our social channels, community forums and video calls to look back at the best
]]>Join us for Reclaim’s Rewind 2024 to celebrate community, collaboration and our continued commitment to advocate for the open web in Higher Education and beyond. This December we are taking to the airwaves, our social channels, community forums and video calls to look back at the best of 2024.
Join us for activities highlighting the best bits from the past year, including case studies and lessons learned. It’s time to take a step back and reflect together on everything we have achieved in partnership with admin, faculty and students, to gather our strength and find some renewed inspiration before the new year starts.
Let’s Rewind 2024 together as you tune in and join the conversation. Here’s what’s in store: https://events.reclaimhosting.com/
Reclaim Rewind 2024: Live on Reclaim TV and Radio
December 6th
It’s a Reclaim TV and Radio Special - with the team from Reclaim. We have had quite a year and our team is coming live on air to share some of the best bits of 2024, the drama that shook the (edtech) world and how we have come out fighting the good fight for indie edtech on the other side.
Event info
Reclaim Rewind 2024: Live on Reclaim TV - Case study bonanza
December 13th
It may not yet be quite time for the holidays, but this is one cracking holiday special you don’t want to miss. Over the course of the year we have worked together with truly inspiring educators to tell their story of empowering students and staff using open edtech. This is a special bumper edition of goodness, bringing together all the case studies into one inspirational hour on Reclaim TV.
Event info
Community Chat: Rewind 2024
December 18th
For this final community chat of the year we are inviting ALL our special guests from 2024 to come together. You will hear updates of the exciting work happening across our community and have a chance to share your own highs and lows of 2024. This is our time to come together to say thank you and acknowledge and appreciate everyone who works in open edtech in Higher Education.
Event info
Reclaim Rewind 2024: Live on DS106 Radio. It’s the HOLIDAY SPECIAL
December 20th
We are inviting you to join us for the one and only edtech radio holiday special, featuring guests from the legendary DS106 Radio Summer Camp. There is going to be story telling, holiday tunes and, if you are very lucky, even a bit of festive KaraOERke. The elves are working hard on that one. So listen in and play along as we ROCK the airwaves and ring in the holidays.
Event info
If that wasn’t enough, look out for a festive edition of the Reclaim Roundup on December 20th, the Rewind 2024 to round off your year and see you into the holidays with GIF-tastic Season’s Greetings from everyone at Reclaim!
Hello and welcome to your quick mid-month summary of all things important and upcoming across our community:
News
Security Update: OWASP Deployment & Rollback
PSA: Reclaim Hosting deployed numerous ModSecurity updates using the built-in OWASP vendor provided by WHM. Due to these updates, many users faced issues like 403 errors,
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Hello and welcome to your quick mid-month summary of all things important and upcoming across our community:
News
Security Update: OWASP Deployment & Rollback
PSA: Reclaim Hosting deployed numerous ModSecurity updates using the built-in OWASP vendor provided by WHM. Due to these updates, many users faced issues like 403 errors, authentication failures, and disconnects. These rules have since been rolled back infrastructure-wide. We are currently revising our policy to implement these rules again in the future, and you can read more about that on our blog as well.
Meet the Open Web UI Installer for Reclaim Cloud
We are excited to announce the newest Reclaim Cloud Installer, OpenWebUI! If you are interested in working with Open Learning Language Models check out our stream around larger open language models to learn more about OpenLLMs and hosting OpenWebUI on Reclaim Cloud.
Upcoming PHP Version Changes
As time goes on and versions change, we need to update our cPanel servers' default PHP versions and remove deprecated versions. The changes will affect Shared Hosting customers and sites hosted on Domain of One's Own and Managed cPanel servers. We've published plans for those changes for 2025.
Convergence 10 Years On
Back in October Meredith Huffman was part of a 10 year anniversary celebration of UMW’s Hurley Convergence Center (originally the Information Technology Convergence Center). Inspired by the event, Jim wrote a post to reflect on his time at UMW with all those awesome folks and projects... 10 Years on!
Open Education community heads to Brisbane
We are proud to support this year's OE Global Conference taking place in Brisbane, Australia, November 13-17th. Community is at the heart of what we do as an independent hosting company in Higher Education, and we are excited to be part of this wonderful event again this year. The key part of our collaboration with OE Global is the 'Conference of the Air' - a radio offering that runs alongside the formal conference schedule.
Don't miss the Reclaim Roundup
Subscribe to our free monthly Roundup and don't miss out on the best GIF game on the open web (and yes, important service updates, security news and free events, too!). The Roundup is scheduled for 11/22 and 12/20, so don't miss out.
Community Chat: The WordPress Drama
November 20th, 12-1pm ET
For this month’s community chat, we thought it made sense to talk about the Automattic and WP Engine drama, what that means for WordPress and the community of folks who use WordPress, and generally provide a place to ask questions, discuss, and share advice.
Read our recent blog post to catch up and start thinking about how to navigate the future of WordPress... and join us and have your say!
Be Kind. Rewind 2024
Join us for Reclaim’s Rewind 2024 to celebrate community, collaboration, and our continued commitment to advocate for the open web in Higher Education and beyond. This month we are taking to the airwaves, our social channels, community forums, and video calls to look back at the best of 2024.
Join us for activities highlighting the best bits from the past year, including case studies and lessons learned. It’s time to take a step back and reflect together on everything we have achieved in partnership with admin, faculty and students, to gather our strength and find some renewed inspiration before the new year starts.
Let’s Rewind 2024 together as you tune in and join the conversation.
What's on Reclaim TV
This month, tune in to Reclaim.TV, live on Fridays at 10am ET:
- November 15 - Moving from Hugo to Ghost . Taylor's making a big CMS switch for his blog, he has lots of feeling about it, and wants to share what he's learned.
- November 22 - Public Obsidian notes on cPanel . Oh yeah, we're back with another Obsidian stream. This time let's look at a static site generator that's pretty easy to use, and designed for Obsidian called Quartz!
And while you're waiting for these streams to premiere, catch up on shows with Reclaim TV On Demand:
You can see the updated schedule at any time by checking out events.reclaimhosting.com!
]]>PSA: Reclaim Hosting deployed numerous ModSecurity updates using the built-in OWASP vendor provided by WHM. Due to these updates, many users faced issues like 403 errors, authentication failures, and disconnects. These rules have since been rolled back infrastructure-wide.
Due to the many issues with scanning and bot traffic we have
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PSA: Reclaim Hosting deployed numerous ModSecurity updates using the built-in OWASP vendor provided by WHM. Due to these updates, many users faced issues like 403 errors, authentication failures, and disconnects. These rules have since been rolled back infrastructure-wide.
Due to the many issues with scanning and bot traffic we have seen across our fleet, we have been implementing numerous tools to stop this traffic before it impacts our clients. One of these tools was the OWASP (Open Source Foundation for Application Security) Vendor for ModSecurity that is provided with WHM by default. We rolled out this update to our development servers to test its impact, then quietly rolled out the rules to all cPanel servers as a planned low-impact update to guarantee satisfactory performance for all users.
Unfortunately, this rollout did not go as planned. The rules did stop the bot traffic; however, they also highly impacted users and blocked legitimate traffic like authentication, WordPress plugins, file uploads, and more. This was due to an oversight during our testing process, and we are revising this process so we do not miss this again in the future.
Once the impact was realized, these rules were rolled back across our entire infrastructure immediately and the vendor itself removed to prevent auto-enable after rule updates.
We apologize for any inconvenience caused by these updates, and are revising our policies for security updates and development testing to prevent this scenario from happening again.
]]>This month, our community chat offers an open forum to discuss events unfolding in the world of WordPress.
Join the conversation - November 20 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
For this month’s community chat, we thought it made sense to talk about the Automattic and WP
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This month, our community chat offers an open forum to discuss events unfolding in the world of WordPress.
Join the conversation - November 20 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
For this month’s community chat, we thought it made sense to talk about the Automattic and WP Engine drama, what that means for WordPress and the community of folks who use WordPress, and generally provide a place to ask questions, discuss, and share advice. Join us for the chat.
Recent developments
If you'd like to catch up on what's been happening, here are some useful links to resources to keep informed:
Syed Balkhi
Ivan Mehta
What it means for institutions using WordPress
If you are someone in charge of a site that runs WordPress, or perhaps you are a Domain of One's Own or WordPress Multisite admin leading a community of folks using WordPress, this won't have much of an impact on you. WordPress still powers 43% of websites and this trademark dispute between large companies has much more to do with their businesses than your ability to use this tremendously popular, free and open-source tool.
The main thing to note is that WP Engine as a company no longer has access to WordPress.org, which means that their plugins will not be available there. WP Engine has a guide on how to install their plugins here, but the process is no different from other plugins that require manual installation, like those you might find on GitHub.
Navigating risk and uncertainty
Providing the best support we can is important to us at Reclaim Hosting, and we follow events like this so that you can rely on us as you navigate risk and uncertainty. For many in the Higher Ed community this dispute between Automattic and WP Engine is worrying to watch, but based on what's happening at the moment our team doesn't anticipate it having a large impact on most people using WordPress for their sites. That being said, we do regularly use this site and our monthly newsletter to let folks know about security updates, new tools, and anything we think may be relevant to our customers. We recommend checking in to stay up to date, and asking questions when you have them!
Taylor Jadin
Beyond WordPress: Resilient infrastructure
We have the expertise to help institutions assess their current infrastructure and use of WordPress, advising on ways to make the infrastructure more resilient and explore open-source tools and platforms beyond WordPress. If you want to start a larger strategic conversation about how we may be able to help, reach out to us!
]]>We are proud to support this year's OE Global Conference taking place in Brisbane, Australia, November 13-17th. Community is at the heart of what we do as an independent hosting company in Higher Education, and we are excited to be part of this wonderful event again this year.
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We are proud to support this year's OE Global Conference taking place in Brisbane, Australia, November 13-17th. Community is at the heart of what we do as an independent hosting company in Higher Education, and we are excited to be part of this wonderful event again this year.
The key part of our collaboration with OE Global is the 'Conference of the Air' - a radio offering that runs alongside the formal conference schedule:
Alan Levine, Director of Global Community at OE Global, shares his vision for what's ahead in his recent post:
"For OEGlobal 2024 we are rolling out a new concept on an old medium… radio. When was the last time (or likely never for some) that you turned in a radio receiver to listen to music, news? For this year’s conference we are trying out transmitted audio aka radio over the internet as what we are calling “Conference of the Air”.
Extending the reach and participation opportunity for the OEGlobal conference as in previous years includes a selection of live-streamed keynotes/major sessions and a few “from the conference floor” streams. This benefits those in the regions unable to travel. In a turn-around for a part of the world that extends itself to participate in North American / European events, the timing to view live events originating in Australia has challenges."
The conference programme showcases the huge range of work happening on the open web all across Higher Education just now, and this further emphasis just how important open infrastructure, governance, policy and practice has become. So if you are not able to travel to Australia to take part in person, the Conference of the Air format offers an opportunity to tune in and connect with like-minded colleagues.
Join us and listen in as we explore new research, case studies and advances from across a global community. Here's how to take get involved:
Explore the Conference of the Air schedule:
Go to the online schedule which shows what’s on each day and links to the recordings and further conference information. The URL to bookmark is https://listen.reclaimed.tech/oeglobal .
Listen to live sessions
All you need is a web browser. Tune in directly via the schedule or simply head over to to DS106Radio and enjoy. You can listen to the sessions live or catch the recordings (and transcripts, too!) .
Join in the conversation
Head over to OE Global Connect and join in the conversation. Anyone active or interested in the global Open Education movement is welcome to sign up here and to contribute to discussions in this community. All content is public to read, an account is needed to reply.
Tell your friends
There is no need to register and everyone is welcome. Simply tune in and join the conversation. Share the link https://listen.reclaimed.tech/oeglobal .
As time goes on and versions change, we need to update our cPanel servers' default PHP versions and remove deprecated versions. The changes will affect Shared Hosting customers, as well as sites hosted on Domain of One's Own and Managed cPanel servers. Here are our upcoming plans
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As time goes on and versions change, we need to update our cPanel servers' default PHP versions and remove deprecated versions. The changes will affect Shared Hosting customers, as well as sites hosted on Domain of One's Own and Managed cPanel servers. Here are our upcoming plans for those changes over the course of the next year.
If you are unsure which version of PHP your site is using, or whether your site is set to "inherit" the default version, you can always check and/or the version using the MultiPHP Manager tool in cPanel. Note that it is only possible to set PHP versions for domains or subdomains, not for subdirectories. If a site is installed on a subdirectory (eg, defaultsite.com/example), it will use the PHP version set for its parent domain (in this case, defaultsite.com).
December 2024 - Raising Default Version
In early December 2024 we will be changing the default PHP version on all our cPanel servers, from PHP 8.0 to PHP 8.1. Only the default command-line PHP and sites set to "inherit" the PHP version will be impacted by this change; all other sites with a specified PHP version will remain using that PHP version.
December 2025 - Raising Default Version
In December 2025, in order to better align ourselves with PHP's timeline of supported versions (https://www.php.net/supported-versions.php), we will be switching the default PHP version from PHP 8.1 (the version we will have switched to in December 2024) to PHP 8.2; likewise, only the PHP CLI and sites set to "inherit" will be impacted by this change, with sites using a specified PHP version remaining un-impacted.
End-of-Year 2025 - Removal of PHP 7.3 & 7.4
Before EOY 2025 we plan to have PHP 7.3 fully removed from our cPanel servers. Actual dates of removal will be communicated once the timeline is more defined, and removal of PHP 7.4 will follow afterwards at an unspecified time.
]]>Reclaim Hosting is excited to announce the newest Reclaim Cloud Installer, OpenWebUI!
Meredith and Taylor talked through the installer and a small demo last Friday Oct 18th to showcase the new installer
We've had some interest in working with Open Learning Language Models as AI is becoming more
Reclaim Hosting is excited to announce the newest Reclaim Cloud Installer, OpenWebUI!
Meredith and Taylor talked through the installer and a small demo last Friday Oct 18th to showcase the new installer
We've had some interest in working with Open Learning Language Models as AI is becoming more of a hot topic these days, so we also did a stream around larger open language models as well
Check them out to learn more about OpenLLMs and hosting OpenWebUI on Reclaim Cloud.
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