Create Something Worth Sharing: Reclaim Hosting
For many students and graduates, the ability to create and run a website has become an important skill to have. But where to start? How to acquire a domain name? Where to host your blog or gallery or portfolio?
Take a Look at Reclaim Hosting
Enter Reclaim Hosting (@ReclaimHosting), a company which “provides educators and institutions with an easy way to offer their students domains and web hosting that they own and control.” Unlike many of the online digital media applications we’ve featured for the Digital Scholarship Lab, Reclaim Hosting does not have a free level, but its Students & Individuals level of service is only $30/year. With it, Reclaim Hosting will provide up to 2GB of storage, unlimited bandwidth, subdomains, and email addresses, as well as integration with a variety of web protocols, including MySQL, PHP, and WebDAV. They’ll also help with transferring a domain name you already own to their servers, free of charge.
Reclaim Hosting’s goal is to help students and faculty (as well as the general population) create and take control of their content. They do this by being affordable (offering three price points) and focused on creation, and not profit. Unlike many web hosts, the only difference between their $30, $50, and $100/year services is the amount of storage offered. The support and the features are otherwise equal, meaning that users at all levels get the same access to applications and the same professional user support.
What Can You Do With It?
Reclaim Hosting uses a cPanel interface, which means that managing your site is fairly simple, and has a software library of more than 100 different web applications that can be installed to your site. Even people with very little experience in web development can navigate the process of creating their website with ease because of the user-focused functionality of the Reclaim Hosting service, and the majority of applications are “one-click” installations, meaning that there’s not a lot of intimidating tech-speak or fumbling through code to keep you from creating the best website you can imagine. You can create blog with WordPress, use Omeka to publish your capstone project, Scalar to publish your essays and long-form scholarly writings, or Mahara to create your final portfolio on your site. And these are just a few examples of the flexibility that Reclaim Hosting offers.
But one of the best things about Reclaim Hosting is their commitment to open source resources. Many (if not most) of the applications that Reclaim Hosting supports are open source, so they’re free and their code is transparent and often customizable or adaptable to your needs (if you’re an experienced coder or developer). Additionally, they are big on collaborative support, and host a community forum full of answers on how to install and use various applications, how to troubleshoot issues, and more. Users are invited to explore the documentation and guides, as well as contribute their own knowledge by writing tutorials or walk-throughs for others to reference in the future.
So, if you’re looking for a way to host and create your own website, whether for school, personal use, or as you begin the process of leaving Marquette to enter into the workforce, Reclaim Hosting might be the tool to suit your needs. No matter your level of experience with digital content and creation, you’ll be able to create something worth sharing with it.
For a wonderful example of the kind of website you can create with Reclaim Hosting and a combination of digital media tools — in this case, using the Omeka web-publishing platform and digital mapping softwares Carto and MapWarper — look no further than Marquette PhD student Cory Haala’s Near West Side History Project.
