ReclaimEDU: A Reclaim Case Study
For our second Reclaim Case Study production, we wanted to pull from the knowledge and experience of our team to give you a deeper look at Reclaim's latest and greatest... ReclaimEDU!
You've heard about what ReclaimEDU is— our new multiregion cloud hosting service for .edu sites— but we thought you should also know how we got here.
It all began back around November 2021, during a Reclaim team trip in Nashville, Tennessee, where the team, somewhat smaller than it is today, sat down in a brainstorming huddle and agreed that multiregion web hosting was to be the next big aspiration for the company. Jim and Tim had been tossing ideas back and forth and exploring the idea for a little while up to then, and took advantage of one of the rare opportunities the team had to be in the same room to float the idea over to our System Administrator, Chris. They and the rest of the team could see how this could be big: the glittering promise of near 100% uptime with multiple, simultaneously synchronizing instances of a high-trafficked site beckoned our attention and efforts.
It wasn't until almost a full year later in the late summer/early fall of 2022 that the team had capacity to start actually building with multiregion; but when they did, things took off at top speed. The timing was right, and everything was falling into place. We had Reclaim Cloud up and running with serious success by then, and were getting our sea legs with Cloudflare, so we were well positioned to test out a DEV instance of our reclaimhosting.com site with multiregion using this setup. The site was running in perfect sync on two separate servers so that if one went down, the other could continue serving the site with no interruption.
And... it worked!
It wasn't long before we began running reclaimhosting.com's PROD instance, and got a third server up and running, dedicated to maintaining a static copy of the site so that, if the other two servers both fail at the same time, there's still something that can be served.
We realized the potential this setup had for much bigger operations than our somewhat tame home site. It was clear from the get-go that higher education institutions running their .edu sites on WordPress could greatly benefit from this kind of speed and uptime. Never ones to drag our feet, we shared our enthusiasm for this potential and our own success in getting it to work reliably with institutions like Macalester and Trinity College, who trusted us to get them set up as well.
The buzz in our Slack when the first university got up and running with multiregion was an unforgettable giddiness: "Guys, it's up, and it's fast!"
So, to say the least, we're completely ecstatic to finally have this available as a formal service for the wider community, and can't wait to see the difference it makes for our users and their mission-critical sites.
Key takeaways:
- Uptime, Uptime, Uptime!
- Multiregion means failover: since your site is running on more than a single server, if one server goes down, the other can pick it right back up!
- When all else fails, visitors can still get a static version of your site. No more HTTP Error 500 pages!
- The speeeed!
- Persistent caching keeps things quick.
- Traffic is always pushed to the most responsive/performant server at any given time.
- Security is our middle name
- DDoS Protection prevents attacks taking the server offline
- WAF blocks malicious traffic from ever reaching server(s)
Further reading...
... on ReclaimEDU
- ReclaimEDU homepage!
- ReclaimEDU: the Infomercial by Jim Groom
- Announcing ReclaimEDU: Your Campus in the Cloud by Pilot Irwin
... on the multiregion journey
