Reclaim Hosting: Where have you been all my life?!
I’ve taken a little time over the Christmas break to put together a simple personal homepage, with a few basic details about me, my current projects, links to this blog, and links to my social profiles.
I thought this would be the perfect time to sing the praises of Jim Groom and Tim Owens, who have been incredibly helpful as I built my new site on their fantastic Reclaim Hosting service.
Designed as a web hosting service for educators and institutions (but not limited to this audience btw), in order to provide students with domains and web space that they both own and control, Reclaim has flourished into an exceptional and very cost effective solution for hosting content online. What’s more, their customer service is second to none, with Jim and Tim providing me with fast, detailed, and all round pleasant support to help me get my domains redirected and my new hosting account tweaked just right.
Known support, out of the box
I’d been interested in trying the simple, social publishing platform ‘Known’ for some time, as a way to collate my random social mumblings into one place. Reclaim provides one-click installation of a hosted Known site right from the admin panel. You can literally add a Known instances to a sub-domain on your site in less than minute. Awesome!
Sites for your entire faculty or school
If you want to offer a full blown multi-site system for your faculty or school, then you can also do this through Reclaim. They offer the ability for students to register sub-domains through your (branded) main site, from which they can set up their own instances of WordPress, Known, Drupal and so on. There are a ton of different auto install options available, I’m sure they’ll have whatever you might need. And if not, get in touch with them, I bet they’ll be happy to help you figure out what you need.
I plan to take advantage of these multi-site features for a future project at Coventry University next year. To be honest, I can’t wait.
Bonus feature!
One final awesome feature worth noting is the ability to earn credit toward your future hosting fees by referring others to use Reclaim. This is a fantastic little bonus, and makes it even more appealing an option for students to create their own domains in the most affordable way possible. Here’s my shameless referral link, create one for yourself when you get your site up and running ;)
I can’t recommend these guys highly enough and I look forward to working with them in the future through my Learning Technologist day job.
