My name is Ed Beck and I am an Instructional Designer at SUNY Oneonta. Our Domains Project is a little bit unique in that we share one DoOO instance across multiple campuses.
SUNY has been doing a lot of work with OER, and some of the best platforms for OER are setup in a way that multiple campuses end up utilizing the same infrastructure. All 64 campuses share a commercial Pressbooks instance that our vendor keeps pretty locked down, for example they won’t install the H5P, Hypothesis, or other plugins that many other national OER community members use because of how many more tables that adds to the database. I’m always interested in learning about infrastructure that can scale!
I used to run my own Pressbooks on the AWS cloud that I built from scratch without a template or one click installer. Just that experience made me very useful in SUNY, especially when troubleshooting problems and issues with our vendor. They used to tell us that certain things weren’t possible, until I got in the habit of sending them directions of how to fix it (everything I know is because I broke it on another site)!
Beyond the idea of scalable infrastructure, I am interested in platforms that we wouldn’t be able to run on LAMP. Open Assessments by MIT, Discourse, Ghost. I’m excited to try to build some things other than what I already know!
(And then I installed Moodle on Reclaim.Cloud, an application that was familiar and comfortable. Got to start somewhere I guess)
I would say it has to getting at least 1500-2000 views a day, and even then with good caching you might be able to get away with shared hosting. A good rule of thumb is that most WordPress sites will not need Reclaim Cloud at all, the few that do would be running into resource issues on shared hosting. I had that issue enough times with bavatuesdays that it was draining the shared hosting resources, so it was time to break it away.
For a slightly a different scenario, ds106 gets less page views/bot traffic than bavatuesdays, but it is more resource intensive because it relies heavily on FeedWordPress which is constantly running cron jobs pinging hundreds of RSS feeds. Whats more, the database is bloated with over 100,000 posts, so any call demands more resources. This sites eats up 3x the resources as bavatuesdays on the Cloud, and it was a regular culprit bringing down shared hosting services.
So those are two examples, but I would say WordPress Multisite instances for a campus that has peak traffic when faculty and students hit the service all at once, such as sign-ups during class, Sunday night submissions, conference sites, etc. would be perfect use case for Reclaim Cloud because you would only pay for resources you use, but it can scale when and if you were to get a rush of concurrent traffic.
So, I am thinking by and large our bigger, legacy WordPress Multi site will see the most advantage of Reclaim Cloud, most WordPress users would be crazy to move given the cost of running a modestly trafficked site in the Cloud would be significantly more expensive.
Update; For your use-cases above (I read backwards), Reclaim Cloud might be a really good model for you because you would not pay based on users in the SUNY systems (which could be thousands and thousands) but exactly what the SUNY Pressbooks instance uses resource-wise. While not being able to promise anything given how early on this is, I think one of the motivating factors for us to get the Cloud going now is that I believe it will have a major impact on infrastructure pricing for servers that will get away from the model of always paying for the most expensive server or tier in expectation of certain traffic, but rather paying exactly for what has been used (which can also be capped). It is thinking of server resources akin to how we treat utilities like water, electricity, and gas right now, and that is a powerful and important shift for systems like yours trying to do this still at scale.
That’s why alot of my focus has been on Pressbooks honestly, and I don’t mean to sound like a broken record that everything is about Pressbooks.
One of the things that is unique about a full Pressbooks install is that it can connect to other Pressbooks servers and clone openly licensed content from one server to another. So if courses.lumenlearning.com or oer.hawaii.edu has a book that I want a local copy of, I can clone the entire book to my server, including all of the images, H5P interactives, etc. Then utilizing the open license, I can start to modify my copy to deliver to my students.
The issue there is… the cloning operation itself is a much higher workload than just showing the website, even on a very busy website. We have had issues when new servers have spun up in the middle of a complicated and long task, and somehow broken it.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, and a perfect use-case for Reclaim Cloud. I would love to discuss this in more detail, and I will setup a call with David and see if I can learn more about how Pantheon works and if this might me a good stress test example for Reclaim Cloud. I’ll keep you in the loop on that.
I’m late to the introductions, but I’m Brian and I’m a K-12 teacher in Michigan. I’ve been on shared Reclaim for several years and much of my dabbling recently has been with Python backends (Flask, mostly). I can get it running in cPanel, but it’s a little bit of a bear to do. I’ve wanted to learn about distributed cloud hosting, so I’m giving Reclaim Cloud a spin.
Hey All - Ethan Watrall from Michigan State University. I’m stupidly excited about cloud for a ton of reasons. My own person infrastructure, infrastructure for my lab, my fellowship program, my digital heritage & archaeology classes…the list is endless. I’d like to test deployment of our digital repository platform (Kora).
Hi, I’m Christopher from the Center for Teaching and Learning at Baruch College, City University of New York.
Trying to keep our (as Jim calls them) “bigger, legacy WordPress Multi site” Blogs@Baruch up and running. Since we occasionally get spikes that bring things down at the start of semesters and during finals, thought Cloud might work better for that.
Hi everyone! I’m Brian Geyer, a Doctoral Candidate at Michigan State University; Ethan Watrall above is one of my dissertation committee members. I’m here to poke around and figure out installing php applications on Reclaim Cloud, as well as to further improve my systems infrastructure knowledge.
Hi everyone, my name is Paul Hibbitts and I am an educator (Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada), interaction designing open source author, and long-time Reclaim Hosting fan🙂 My Grav CMS projects (e.g. Open Course Hub) and Docsify projects (e.g. Open Publishing Starter Kit) are for tech-savvy educators and publishers who want to leverage Markdown and Git (e.g. GitHub, GitLab, etc.) workflows with their open content. Through the kindness of OpenETC I’ve tried a few apps out on both Sandstorm and Cloudron. I look forward to possibly trying out RocketChat and Grav on Reclaim Cloud.
My slogan for FOSS is “Open Source is Choice” so I am totally jazzed to see what is starting with Reclaim Cloud - congrats to everyone involved in the Beta launch🚀
Hi. My name is Jason Green and I’m the Director of Academic Technology at University of Arkansas - Pulaski Technical College. I’ve been a Reclaim customer since it was Hippie Hosting and am excited about cloud mostly as a way to build out personal cyberinfrastructure with things that won’t run in shared hosting (my workplace does this with Azure)
I really need to get a grasp of Docker containers in Jelastic, so I can install those things rather than pestering Reclaim about what is and isn’t available in Marketplace.
Hey Hey, I’m JR Dingwall from Saskatoon in Canada. I work in higher ed as an instructional designer and have been working on coupling theory and practice in educational technology. There have been a few applications where I ran into exactly the problem Tim mentioned in the intro video of Shared Hosting not allowing customizable stacks, so I’m pretty pumped to give Reclaim Cloud a try. Adapt Learning and oTree are the two I’m currently thinking about trying out in the beta. Thanks for letting us kick the tires!
R.C. Miessler from Gettysburg College, long-time DoOO fan and looking forward to what the Cloud can do. It would be really interesting to find a way to do easy(ier?) deployments of Manifold Scholarship, although I am not entirely sure how feasible it is! I’m really impressed with the platform but ran into a lot of hassles trying to get it working with AWS, especially with a custom FQDN and SSL.
Hello, I am Robb Kantor and I am exploring using the Reclaim Cloud for my Discourse community forum for a couple of my wordpress sites leveraging Docker. I am a webmaster for a couple different sites and this is a good way to check out the capability of this new infrastructure. The tutorials were very good and everything worked as desired. Looking forward to seeing what other opportunities this platform will enable me to accomplish.
Hi! I’m Shannon and I work at public liberal arts college that is utilizing Domain of One’s Own. I’m in the unit that manages our DoOO and I’m interested to see how Reclaim Cloud could meet some of niche needs we have on campus that aren’t met by DoOO.
Most importantly I want to try and spin up my own Minecraft server so I can play with all my friends.
