Jim Groom: When I started I was like
look at this the blog turned into a CMS.
This is amazing, right?
And then you would have just seen the PHP.
Jesse Friedman: Now with the site editor,
you can install the 2024 theme across
an entire network and every single site
could look completely different based on
the controls that you give those users.
Ronnie Burt: We were built completely
on AWS and our AWS bills in August and
January were significantly higher than
our AWS bills in the other months.
That was just a fact of life.
And also you have to be careful
on pushing updates and making
any changes during those times.
Jesse Friedman: Welcome to Impressive
Hosting, where we seek to uncover the
core tenets of great WordPress hosting.
I'm your host, Jesse Friedman,
and with me today are Jim Groom
from Reclaim Hosting and Ronnie
Burt from Gravatar at Automattic.
Jim, could you give us a little
bit of an intro, help us understand
what you've been working on?
Sure.
Jim Groom: So I am actually, a
majority partner, I guess
you'd say, at Reclaim Hosting.
We're a small, higher ed focused web
hosting company and we're a distributed
company and before that I worked for about
20 years in higher ed, both as a professor
and as an instructional technologist.
Jesse Friedman: Awesome.
Thanks, Jim.
Why don't you jump in and help us
understand a little bit about where
what you've been working on lately?
Ronnie Burt: Sure, I, similar
to Jim, was an educator, both
secondary and at the university.
And then I spent about 12 years
working on getting WordPress
into higher ed institutions.
And the last three years I've worked
at Automatic on Sensei LMS, our
learning management plugin, and
working on Gravatar, and also some
of our education, just commitments
to still trying to get more and more
students and universities to use
Jim Groom: We must have lived
parallel lives, Ronnie, I think.
Ronnie Burt: We have.
I think we've met once or twice in
the, way back in the day, briefly.
Jim Groom: I'm not surprised
given what you're doing.
Absolutely.
Jesse Friedman: And for those of you
at home, if you haven't already been
able to tell, today we're going to be
discussing hosting for higher education.
All right to jump in, Jim you
And I met at WPCampus this year.
I had presented on unpacking multisite
and you had some great insight as well.
And we got to talking a little bit about
WPCloud and your hosting company and what
we're both trying to do to help provide
better hosting to higher education.
And then I came home and I did
some research and I learned about
what you've been working on.
And the first thing that spoke
to me was a domain of one's own.
And I would love to hear more about
Jim Groom: Yeah, absolutely.
A domain of one's own is a play on
Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own.
It was part of a group at the University
of Mary Washington, a small liberal arts
public school in Virginia, that we wanted
to give faculty, students, and admin
their own web hosting space so that they
could install whether it be WordPress,
which most did, or Drupal, or, Scalar,
Omeka, all of these PHP based apps.
Even if they go back to writing
HTML or what have you we wanted it
to be a space that they controlled
and that they took with them.
And that this idea that this space would
be you know, a sense of identity for them,
a digital identity that they took well
beyond their time at Mayor Washington.
Now, with the rise of Instagram and
some of the Facebooks and I think a
lot of my Gen Xers, I'm disappointed
with their Facebook habits.
But in the end, it's something I still
very much believe in is the idea of
building and creating your personal
identity online and narrating your
work and narrating your reflections.
And that was a, doing that in higher ed
was a key place to do it because, you know
that's where they were already doing that
for a whole bunch of different topics.
So bringing that online and doing
that, oftentimes WordPress was a tool
of choice because it's ease of use
and how robust it was, you know pretty
much what Domain of One's own came.
We did it at UMW.
But then, other schools wanted
it, so that's when I rolled out of
UMW and started Reclaim Hosting.
Jesse Friedman: So that's what
Reclaim Hosting is focused on
...
Jim Groom: Yeah, that's one of
the things it does, absolutely.
Jesse Friedman: Okay.
And what are the core
technical components of that?
So we're talking about giving students
and professors an opportunity to manage a
property, let's say on the internet have
a domain, and then they can use that to
share their content, speak their voice,
as you said, share their narrative around
what it is that they're working on.
But what is that actually built on?
Is that on a WordPress multi site?
Is it some other forms of technology?
What other components go
Jim Groom: So The Domain of
One's Own is specifically built
on cPanel, so that we could give
people their own web hosting suite.
Fact oftentimes there will be a kind
of bifurcation when universities will
say, Do you want your own cPanel?
Or is that too much?
Or do you want a WordPress as
part of a WordPress multi site?
And it's interesting where we started
with cPanel, but for certain tasks,
for certain folks, cPanel's overkill.
And they just want a WordPress
site on WordPress multi- site.
I think domain of one's own.
While our kind of version of it, which
really integrates single sign on and
cPanel and WordPress is the portal on
top of it, and cPanel is embedded within
the page of WordPress, it's pretty slick.
The idea of Domain of One's Own, while
as a product it's cPanel with people
being able to build this, I think as a
concept it's much bigger than that, right?
And it's not limited to
what Reclaim Hosting sells.
It's the idea that people should manage
their own domain and become a node
on the web and keep the web weird and
avoid kind of everything aggregating
to just a few sites and you having
no real history or reflection or a
piece of what it is you contributed
that's outside of some of those spaces
that I feel like they just bury it.
That's, I guess there's the product
and then there's the vision and the
kind of the larger kind of thing that
doesn't depend upon Reclaim Hosting.
It just depends upon believing
that the web should be
cultivated with individual sites.
Back to the 2005- 2006 web, where people
blogged actually, and they wrote about
stuff, and they commented, and there
was this idea of RSS, and you could
create these beautiful syndication hubs.
I think it comes out of that, and there's
a hippie driving around in the bus still
believing that this could happen, man!
The revolution's here, man!
Jesse Friedman: That's a great point.
I actually spoke or taught at two
universities for seven, seven years.
And while I was teaching web design,
multimedia, things like that, I had
advocated internally at the universities
on more than one occasion for students
to be able to have their own property,
their own carve out their own ownership
of the web, not just because it's
important skill to have, but also
because when you have, control over,
as you mentioned before, control over,
An open source piece of technology
that allows you to express yourself.
That is relevant to anybody
in any educational field.
So whether they're learning to
become a lawyer or a doctor or web
designer, whatever it might be,
being able to understand how the web
operates and how to express yourself,
I think is incredibly important.
Jim Groom: Yeah, I
totally agree with that.
Jesse Friedman: Ronnie you've
worked on multisite and in
higher ed for a long time.
Why do you think higher education
institutions tend to choose multisite?
Ronnie Burt: A lot of it has to do
with, you have a shared database
and a multi site installation.
And that shared database
makes a lot of things easier.
Some things harder,
but some things easier.
And some of those things that are
easier include authentication, user
management, and just the tie in to
the single sign on solutions that
the higher ed institution's using.
And also if there's some sort of
branding guidelines, having a shared
theme or a shared set of themes,
that also is easier in a multisite.
I am still a huge advocate of
multisite, and I think there's
still a good place for it to play.
But are some of those strengths,
like different today than they were
back when multisite started, and we
started getting involved in multisite?
Or are there things now that you
can do other ways with single sites?
Are you experiencing that or seeing
that with your, the folks you work with?
Jim Groom: I don't have, "you should
do domain of one's own and multisite."
I started on multisite.
UMW blogs was an early platform that
the group I was with helped create.
And I love that.
We have 15, 000 sites.
It scaled beautifully.
It provided a network where, like
you said we could change themes
and plugins all in one place.
It was one site to upgrade,
not 9, 000 sites to upgrade.
It had so many benefits.
But one of the things our
group started thinking about
was are we limiting ourselves
by doing, "here's just one tool."
What does it mean to give people
a bigger sense of literacy, like
learning about DNS, learning about
domains, learning about databases.
In some ways it was a pedagogical
sensibility, but not necessarily Oh,
because WordPress Multisite sucks.
In fact, WordPress Multisite was
the thing that made it possible.
It's the thing that made everybody
so compelled by the idea of
having a digital presence.
And I think about it like you
were on a WordPress multi site
and then you got really excited.
What's the next thing you would do?
Maybe take it out of that WordPress
multi site and get your own
hosting and explore further, right?
You would build sites, you would
create a kind of WordPress enabled app.
You'd go to the next level
because you were hooked.
And we had enough people at our
university hooked that they wanted more.
University, faculty, and students alike.
And that was not an evolution.
Because it suggests that WordPress
Multisite is a devolution, right?
It's not.
It provided our offerings
to be that much richer.
And I think that really is the idea.
It's like we were providing
more than we were before.
And I stand by WordPress Multisite.
It's great.
We have some of the biggest
WordPress Multisites out there
that we support and host.
And that database can be a
real son of a gun, I'll tell ya.
If it's not sharded or
dealing with something.
But I wouldn't privilege
one over the other frankly.
I think they work best
together if you will.
Jesse Friedman: Yeah, I think
that multisite opens the door for
you to have a lot more control.
You mentioned that before, right?
So I think for people at home who aren't
familiar with multisite, multisite is
a way in which WordPress can operate
as a network of sites that uses the
same core files at the core level.
It allows for you to upload themes and
plugins and manage those across the
entire network of sites in one hit.
So when you're updating one plugin, you're
updating it across that entire network.
It gives you the ability to have
user roles and then a new role called
super admin, which gives you more
control over the entire network.
But there are some challenges
with multi site as well.
As you said, you get a huge database.
A lot of times with multi site, this
isn't like inherent to a problem with
multi site, but I think that because of
the fact that we ended up using multi
site to handle thousands of sites, you
get a lot of concurrent admin users which
can, be painful and hard to to compensate
for from a performance perspective.
Jim, I would love to hear a
little bit more about that.
Like, how do you approach that?
If someone comes to you looking to
build a a multi site that could grow?
Maybe they're building a site for every
student they have, for every professor
they have, every department inside the
education or inside the university.
You can end up with thousands
of sites in a period of years.
How do you go about approaching that
so that you're building something
small in the beginning that needs
to be able grow to thousands?
Jim Groom: Yeah, that's
a really good question.
It's something we were challenged
with early on because we took on
Virginia Commonwealth University had
a instance called Rampages, which
was run by Tom Woodward and his team,
and Gardner Campbell and their team
at VCU, and it had 35, 000 sites.
And for a university site, that's
a big WordPress multi site.
And at the time, it was hosted
on WordPress Engine, and I think
WordPress Engine was like, No, we
don't want this anymore, and so
little Reclaim Hosting was like,
Okay, let's figure out how to do this.
And so what we did is we moved that over
and we had, we host our instances, some
of them on DigitalOcean, some of them
are in our own cloud called ReclaimCloud.
And I think, what we figured out
is, we could shard that database,
which we did, which sometimes is
not recommended, sometimes is.
But the infrastructure has gotten so much
stronger than it was in 2008 or 2009 when
we were doing it, that the servers are
faster, they can manage these databases
better, we're backing up nightly, we're
taking images, so that if something
disastrous happens, we can recover.
But by and large, a big server,
BP server, which you'd need for
that, can handle that quite well.
And we started to get into, when we're
doing edu's, or mission critical sites,
which most of ours are not, to be clear.
Maybe during finals, but it doesn't
have often the same be up or die
like an LMS so that we don't have
failover for all our sites, our cPanel
sites, but for certain ones, we do.
And that's a multi region setup that
sounds very similar to some of the stuff
you said you were doing with Bluehost.
I love that stuff because we're
doing load balanced multi region
one in the west coast one in the
east coast through Cloudflare.
And that just gets to my technical
stuff I really dig having a way and
we're doing a very big multi site
right now That's wildcard DNS and
we're doing that as a multi region and
that's got a 200 gigabyte database So
it's like, you're going into the fire.
So I guess, I don't think we were in
the same situation that I was in 2008,
2009 when UMW blogs would go down
regularly, it was hosted on Bluehost
and it was like $75 Bluehost account
that I was running like 9000 sites and
Bluehost must been like, "What jerk.
Get your stuff onto a
managed host, right?"
I mean I think that the
infrastructure is strong enough.
People doing it on AWS.
We're doing it on DigitalOcean.
We have a cloud where we can do it on
multiple instances in multiple regions.
It's gotten so much more sophisticated.
These Galera clusters where you
can do the databases in different
places if something goes down.
It's a brave new world.
I can't pretend to be either
a full blown coder or a full
blown infrastructure person.
I have better people around
me, but I love the idea of it.
And that's why I got into WordPress
multi site is I love the tinkering
around it and the idea that
you could imagine this space.
And let's think about it.
In 2008, I could provide thousands
of sites for a campus on a enterprise
level software for 75 bucks a month.
It was crazy.
Think about how insane that would be
when you think about what they're playing
Backboard or even Canvas or whatever,
these learning management systems.
I loved that because it was
really like guerrilla ed tech.
Like you said early on, Jesse, like
they were learning skills of the web.
Skills that they would transfer
brilliantly out into the world
when 40 percent of the web now
is controlled by WordPress or
WordPress is what undergirds it.
That's interesting stuff for me, right?
Ronnie Burt: You just reminded
me of 2020, we were hosting
lots of multi site networks for
universities and the world shut down
and the universities went remote.
And so many turned to these existing
multi site setups because it was push
a button and they needed to create new,
Dashboard sites to share statistics, new
emergency sites to share new protocols
and All these things and they were able
to do that within minutes they had a
branded theme and they didn't have they
didn't have time to, go through the normal
bureaucracy that most universities have
in place for new sites and things and
that was just a great example use case.
And that's what was so unique
about what you're doing.
WordPress use in higher ed is no two
instances, no two, implementations
are the same, they all have
their own little nuance, or you
have portfolios for students.
And I'm just curious if you have any
cool, use cases that you've seen recently
that re excites you that universities
are using with their WordPress
.
Jim Groom: As you know both
of you know because you live
WordPress more than me even.
When I started with this I was like
look at this the blog turned into a CMS.
This is amazing, right?
And then you would have just
seen the PHP and you could create
pages that stayed in the theme.
And it was remarkable.
Now You're talking about full blown apps.
You're talking about WordPress
running entire we run dot edu's that
are all WordPress and using multi
site to create departmental sites.
And there's some really
sophisticated examples.
Because I'm doing the multi region
stuff now, because I'm where I am
now I'm digging folks at Macalester
College or Trinity College who are
actually using a WordPress multi site.
to, create their departmental sites,
to create not only their main site,
but like they're using multi site.
How I think it should have been used is
like WordPress is, not only the top thing,
but you can create all these independent,
departmental sites, club sites, student
sites, and it becomes a network.
And the idea that Garner Campbell
said, who I used to work with at Mary
Washington, and I loved it, is it became a
reflection of the life of the mind, right?
The actual domain and the existence
of all these sites and all the
information there, hopefully not just
marketing, but some of it reflection
and about the actual experience of
learning and teaching, becomes this
reflection of a moment, of the school
as a living, breathing experiment.
And that was always the kind
of vision of WordPress I had
when I was doing this stuff.
It became an extension of what was
happening at an institution, and by
extension, it became an example of
all that is good in that institution,
or maybe even all that's bad.
Jesse Friedman: Jim, you have
this romantic view of it.
And I absolutely love that because I think
back to the early nine mid nineties to
late nineties, when I got started building
out on anything out on the web, and it
was such a wonderful time because there
was so much experimenting to be done.
So much new stuff was
coming out all the time.
You could really try some really fun
things and then responsive web design
and then CMSs and everything else.
And it's like a beautiful thing
because, you think back to the old
days of the internet and how there
was so much opportunity to explore new
things and try new things, experiment.
And I feel like maybe we've lost
a little bit of that in the recent
years with social media and folks
are putting a ton of great content
on YouTube things like that.
But those walled gardens create
this I don't know, it's it's like
the medium is exactly the same.
It's always this exact same
type of video or this exact same
type of content or photograph.
And the content itself can be something
amazing, but the actual way in which you
consume it is all through the same exact
apps and everything is exactly the same.
And there isn't that like unique way to
really dive into exploring the web itself.
And so there's benefits to that.
You're more focused on the content,
but what happens now is we are circling
back to the opportunity where you can
really get into editing the way in which
your website is delivering this content
and have it speak more to the way in
which you want to express yourself.
When we got started with multi
site, as you said, back in 2008, I
was managing a few thousand sites.
And we had probably like 10 themes that
you could use across these thousand sites.
And they put up these very
specific guardrails, right?
It made it very easy to control
because all they could do is edit
this very small content area or
change a menu or whatever it might be.
But for the most part, the exact
same design of the site was the same.
Now with the site editor, you can
install the 2024 theme across an entire
network and every single site could
look completely different based on the
controls that you give those users.
I love that idea of going back and
trying to give students or professors
an opportunity to really express
themselves through a website more
than just the content itself that
they can put out onto the web.
Jim Groom: Can I make a,
Jesse Friedman: Yeah, go for it, jump in.
Jim Groom: I don't know how do I say how
this, I don't, I can't use my words right
now, but I want to make a confession.
My confession is I'm still
like a classic editor guy.
Cause I'm old I'll be honest with you.
I am old.
I understand how the site editor works.
I understand Gutenberg and the block
editor, but part of my idea here, when I
was in higher ed, and I don't know if you
felt the same, is the simplicity was key.
You go into a WordPress now, and
it's great if you're a developer.
Because you start to say,
I'm gonna deal with the loop.
I'm gonna deal with CSS.
I'm gonna deal with this, that.
And it's most students, faculty are like,
Whoa, this is a little bit too much.
And it's a great tool for
teaching web development.
It's a great tool for teaching PHP
design or web design or JavaScript.
But I struggle with the simplicity of
what, do you, what sells a class when you
go in and you say, Hey, 30 people, you're
going to be using this to reflect on your
history exam and, or your history course.
And you're say like your, final thesis.
That's a very different kind of sell
than you can start from scratch and
create whatever you want because
to create from whatever you want.
Oftentimes with people who you're
selling for the first time is a brick
wall and they're just like nope.
Don't give me whatever I want.
Tell me what to do.
Jesse Friedman: That's
the beauty of it, though.
The way I look at it is that the
guardrails that we put up the
ability to allow someone to write
content into the classic editor
or an old form field, basically.
Allows you to enter in that content
and then it's off and running.
That's really powerful for students
and professors and folks who just
need to share information about a
history class or whatever it might be.
But the really cool thing about the
editor and the Gutenberg blocks is
that it takes really complex technology
and makes it a lot more simple.
So yes, if you go into writing
custom queries and doing a lot
of complex stuff , of course,
that's a little bit more difficult.
And I think it'll also probably incite
a few people to explore more there.
Maybe they were just planning on
blogging, but now they can learn a whole
new skill and they can build a website.
But there are things that are
unbelievably hard to do on any website
solution that are so much easier now.
Like a great example is the cover block.
You don't need any development skills to
be able to use the cover block, right?
It automatically gives you the
ability to do what's it called?
Dynamic scrolling to have content
over an image, things like that,
that are typically a little bit
harder to do in the classic editor.
So I think there is a good
balance to strike there.
I think what we run into is that
a lot of folks are, anytime that
you run into a blank canvas.
Which Gutenberg and the site editor is in
a sense, you run into a decision problem
where you don't really know where to
start, you don't know how to get things
going, you have unlimited possibilities.
You're overwhelmed so you need those
guardrails to be put up sometimes to
help you guide you right to exactly what
it is that you're hoping to accomplish.
So I think there is a good
balance to strike there.
Ronnie Burt: I hear Jim talk about hosting
main edu websites and department sites
who have strict branding guidelines
and strict design language that must
be adhered to and opening it up to the
whole full site editor and everything is
not, not going to make the branding team
happy, or the design team like, where
they, want a consistent look and feel.
But I have seen people doing
some really cool things.
You can't lock down to these blocks
only or you can have presets of styles
and you not let the fonts be changed
and you don't, you know and all that.
But that is a lot harder
to do than it used to .It
takes a little bit more, knowledge
and overhead and pre planning than
locking it into the CSS of a theme file.
And it's all getting better, but I
can totally understand and appreciate
where some people might feel like
you take a few steps back to go a few
steps forward later in the process.
Jim Groom: It's interesting too.
Wordpress in general right?
It's not just a niche
open source tool anymore.
It is serving, millions
and millions of people.
So obviously it's going to have,
different demands and what I need
it to do in a higher ed organization
is not the same as whatever.
But that's, maybe this goes back
to a good point, Ronnie, that
I never answered your question.
I'm going to try to, like good examples.
There are some people who I work
with on the web, like Alan Levine and
Martha Burtis and some other folks.
And they started, and Tom Woodward,
and they started creating these
tools Which they called SPLOTS,
which is a terrible acronym.
Smallest Possible Learning Online Tool.
I don't know if that's what it means.
But you'll go to a page on a WordPress
site and it will have all of the
forms and pieces for you to fill out.
You want to upload an image
and give you the information it
basically is creating a very simple
interface for the course experience.
And I love that because you can do
that in WordPress as an open source
tool and develop that and they'll
integrate like Gravity Forms and
they'll do some sophisticated stuff.
Another great example of this is we
built a class called DS106, which
is an open online class that kind
of dealt with digital storytelling.
But Martha Burtis went on and
built a assignment bank, using
forms and tags and categories.
And you would submit an assignment
and then other people would see it and
they could decide if they would do it.
And once they did it, they would tag it on
their own site, wherever that was hosted,
and it would pull into the mother blog
and then their example would be there.
So you'd see the main assignment,
but then you'd see everybody
who did the assignment.
And it became a way to
aggregate in the course.
And we did that all with
duct tape and Wordpress.
And that for me is the joy of Wordpress.
Like just because I'm not a developer
who understands the modern vision of
Wordpress in the same way doesn't mean
I still can't do everything I used
to do in a kind of different context.
And that's where I
try and hold my horses.
I'm old enough I guess, where I
have seen a couple of cycles go
through, I'm not like, gosh, it
should be this or it should be that.
It's no, I know the simple things I want
to do and play with and experiment with.
And that's a fun thing about
a tool like WordPress that
gives you the ability to do it.
And it's done that for almost 20
years now or more than 20 years.
, I'm not trying to, throw shade on what
WordPress can or can't do with the editor.
Just more kind of thinking like, that
All that stuff made these innovative
classes that we taught DS 106 possible.
And it's because it was
open source and accessible.
Ronnie Burt: I'm gonna
have to check that out.
That sounds really cool.
Jim Groom: Yeah.
Jesse Friedman: Yeah, that's interesting.
So you touched on something where you
had the content from the network sites
go up to what you call the mother blog.
So is that a common thing where you're
sharing content from one site in a
network to another site in a network?
Jim Groom: I don't know if
you remember a guy named Dr.
Mike.
Remember a guy named Dr.
Mike in the forums?
So this guy, yeah, he
Ronnie Burt: Oh yeah.
Jim Groom: So anyway, he came
up with this thing called a tag
site for WordPress multi site.
So basically you would create, and
maybe Dancha or Danica is the one
who like developed the tag site.
But anyway, it essentially reproduced
every site on the multi network in
one block so that you had a kind of.
Like, how would you say, almost
an entire set of every tag in
every category in one blog.
So that could be one where, even if you
did it across the multi network or the
multi site, you would have a tag that
would link every blog post with that tag
or every blog post with that category,
which early on was really amazing.
So we would use that.
The one with the assignment bank
that I'm talking about is actually
every student for DS 106 got
their own domain and web hosting.
And they would actually blog there.
And then we'd use a plug in
called Feed WordPress by Charles
Johnson to actually pull all of
their sites into the mother blog.
And then they would do it.
It would do the same thing that the post
blog did or the tags blog did that, Dr.
Mike talk about and basically allowed
us to have a official blog with all
the posts, and now that blog has 120,
000 posts because that site had that.
Yeah, that had been such a huge course,
but it basically was doing the same
thing that post blog was that Dr.
Mike created.
And or Donka, I don't know who created it.
It's a little bit thing.
I think it was Danica.
but anyway, that's my story.
Ronnie Burt: And it's like the
good old days of Twitter when
you could search by a tag.
You were at an event, and we
would all use the, same hashtag.
And we don't do that as much anymore,
but it's similar to that and being able
to syndicate it and aggregate it in
Jim Groom: that
Ronnie Burt: way.
Jim Groom: That was the key to
DS106 was it was syndication
and aggregation and RSS, right?
And WordPress allowed for
everything had an RSS tag, every
category, every tag, right?
And that was huge for the stuff we
were doing with these syndication hubs.
Ronnie Burt: I don't
know the answers to this.
It's still over my head, but I'm trying
to learn that the stuff that Fediverse
and these different protocols are using
can make this even better for extending
that conversation going forward.
Jesse Friedman: Yeah it's great, so
over at WP Cloud, we're running a cloud
platform that's built specifically for
WordPress, managed WordPress hosting.
It's delivering WordPress as a
service because we handle all the back
Management of everything top to bottom.
But one of the things I'm thinking about
is how do we help folks who might be
struggling with multi site right now?
And maybe they want to think
about unpacking their multi site.
Things that you get out of the
box with WP cloud that would
help with this is Symlink files.
You can tie GitHub to it so you can
push out a release and it'll update all
the sites on your network in one hit.
But the thing that you get for free
with multi site that I'm thinking about.
is user management.
And so with user management,
you can define specific roles.
And then that role can then be,
that person can then be assigned to
multiple blogs across that network.
So you could have a student maybe
is only able to access their class
websites or their own specific websites.
Professors, maybe they can
access every website in their
department and so on and so forth.
But.
I also know that there are other
tools out there that are managing user
accounts for students and educators
and tying that directly into WordPress
so that their, user or their student
IDs and things like that, right?
They can be tied directly into that.
So let me ask you this.
If someone's thinking about unpacking
a multi site, Is there an advantage
to multisite that you can only get
with multisite in this way in managing
users, or can you replicate users
across multiple sites using the
same technology with these services
that help with student management?
Jim Groom: It's a good
question and it's thorny.
And here's why it's thorny, it's like
these universities certainly do, they
have IDPs, all this information about
students and faculty and courses.
But at the point where they're sharing
that with us as a third party service,
things change in terms of security,
in terms of questions of what do they
allow us access and how do they create
those groups so that we can only get
granular possibilities as much as
a lot of them say, that won't be a
problem initially by the time we get
down to the say, okay, can we pull in
a group for a course to create a course
in WordPress multi site seamlessly?
They're like no.
You know what I mean?
You're going to have to create a
plug in for that, or there's going
to have to be some other way.
And that's, I think, because the
way in which a lot of these identity
management systems are used.
work on campus they're not, I'm not saying
they're not sophisticated, they're very
sophisticated, but I don't think the IT,
and this goes back to a question around
security, they're very comfortable giving
a lot, that information to a third party
vendor for a variety of good reasons.
We have not had really a powerful
way of doing that apart from plugins
that a guy named Boone Gorges at CUNY
had created, which did a great job
of pulling in groups of students,
based on, what class they were.
But that's basically we had a roster
where we could pull in from a CSV.
It had nothing to do with
automagically it's creating.
Now, people piggyback on Canvas
or Moodle or the learning
management system to do that.
And that's different because
then you're just piggybacking on
what they've already shared with
the learning management system.
And I think IT departments are a
lot more comfortable with that.
And, you don't have to give it to
the third party in the same way.
It's a very complicated question, and it
actually has a lot of complicated answers.
We don't integrate often with
the learning management system.
So that's something that I wouldn't
be able to speak so cleanly
to, just to be honest with you.
What API calls they make, where they
do that integration, I'm not sure.
Short answer to your question is, we
haven't had much success with that.
Ronnie Burt: But I would say that the
success you probably had, and that
I used to have, was, it's definitely
easier in a multi site, because you're
only doing it once, and so I can go
to the IT department And be like,
this is the one instance it needs.
It's like public private key pairing or
whatever, where if it was, a thousand
individual sites, we're going to need
separate instances, separate they
probably each will need like some
special server config to, to handle
that authentication method or whatever.
So it's definitely more feasible
in a multi site environment.
And that's definitely a
strength of multi site.
Jesse Friedman: One of the things I was
thinking about is syncing user roles
from one blog to a variety of them.
So you could have one
act as a parent blog.
Grant access to that one with the
right roles to all the students
and professors and everybody else.
And then create a way to sync those
maybe using SSO or something like that to
sync that access across multiple sites.
Might be something worth exploring there.
Ronnie Burt: People have done some work,
like Jim was saying, using LTI with Canvas
and other things to pull class rosters.
There's work there, it's just, it's
always a moving target, so you have to
be careful what you're getting yourself.
Jim Groom: The one of the, two of the
people, I already mentioned Boone Gorges
who's a developer for CUNY, and just
wonderful developer, great person.
But also Tom Woodward, who was behind
the Rampages WordPress multi site.
He's done a lot of this kind of stuff.
Thinking through roles, and because a
lot of times these were freshman seminars
that would get automatically populated.
So he's someone who has
come up with a solution.
But given I don't know the specifics, he's
blogged, he blogs about this regularly.
So I don't think it could
be found on his site.
But he's also probably,
Jesse Friedman: Maybe you'd be a,
Jim Groom: a great guest because He's
actually done a lot of this stuff and
he's thought through a lot of this stuff.
Tom Woodward he's worked now at
Middlebury College, but he, he
does wonderful stuff in plug in
development, but also thinking through
these very questions for higher ed.
Far more in the weeds with the
WordPress code than I ever was, just.
To be clear.
Jesse Friedman: All right, I got one
more question before we wrap things up.
It's November right now, and a lot of the
customers that we are hosting are thinking
about Black Friday and Thanksgiving.
How their e commerce websites are
going to perform during that surge.
Let me ask you this to both of you.
What's your experience with higher
education and that kind of surge?
Are there times in the year when you
need to be ready to compensate for
an influx of traffic, a great deal of
concurrent users, things like that.
What are some of the things that
you think about in that way?
Ronnie Burt: The first
week of any semester.
We were built completely on AWS, where I
was before, and our AWS bills in August
and January were significantly higher
than our AWS bills in the other months.
And that was just a fact of life.
And also you have to be careful
on pushing updates and making
any changes during those times.
You need to be very careful
about when you push these things.
Jim Groom: Ronnie, 100 percent on that.
We're doing server migrations we're
trying to get off CentOS 7 for
some of our cPanel sites and get
on to AlmaLinux 9 or what have you.
And we had this idea that maybe
we can do some of these during
the semester and school's ah, no.
Also when you do those migrations
or when you do any work, you
really have very small windows.
You have, December until whenever the
semester starts and you have a little
bit longer in the summer, although
the summer always gets eaten up with
summer school or something else.
So finding good times to do any kind of
updates or migrations or stuff like that.
It's tricky.
Jesse Friedman: I lied, I said I had
one last question, but you guys just
made me think of one other thing.
Is there anything to think
about special considerations for
universities that aren't distributed
where you have all of your users
within a certain square mile radius.
They're all accessing these sites
from the same areas physically.
Does that matter?
Does that add any complexity to it?
Ronnie Burt: Yes.
If you're running any sort of like
DDoS protection or firewall, they'll
all look like they're coming from
one IP address and, you have to just
figure out how to identify that as
okay traffic and let them in for sure.
Jim Groom: Ronnie, on on the nose
again, we often have a server,
like a class, say, of 300 people.
We'll all sign up.
This happened at the
University of Oklahoma.
They all signed up for a site and
immediately the server was like, "No,
this, IP is obviously, a, bad actor."
And, we had to watch our
firewall and be clear.
Depending upon it, you can have
issues when everyone signs up at once.
But that's also another issue with load,
like you said with Black Friday, right?
If you're trying to sign up hundreds
of people at once, And the server,
if it's not on a very beefy server
the performance could get rough.
That's another thing we run into.
And, the thing we haven't talked about,
but it's worth talking about, and I know
Jesse, you want to wrap this up, so I'll
be really brief, is there's the server
and the infrastructure, which is key, and
I'm very interested in, and I love it, but
then there's the support on the ground.
And I think, Ronnie, you know this
probably better than anyone, like, How
much support you have on a campus for
stuff like WordPress, Multisite, or
whatever other tool you're using is
going to determine how successful it is.
And I think that has been true
With every project I've seen.
And I've seen now hundreds
of them at universities.
And those who have really well
funded, good teams, who have a vision
and kind of have a direction, those
WordPress multi sites flourish.
Those who are just hanging out
there and people don't know
what to do with it, they're not
getting support for it, those die.
And I think there is that.
There's the hosting, and I
think, WordPress hosting,
I'm sure it's great, right?
Reclaim Hosting, I know it's great.
But the idea that it doesn't matter
at the end if they don't have people
on the ground who understand that
technology, can support it cleanly, like
for the community, and then also have
a vision of where it's going and why
they're using it and how to do these
kind of very thoughtful integrations.
That's a key piece and higher ed
struggles a little bit with, funding.
And keeping people because of that, right?
You and me might be examples of just that.
Higher ed has a great mission,
but oftentimes it struggles
with funding that mission.
That's where a lot of
that kind of plays in.
And it's an important thing to
factor in when you're dealing with.
And one of the questions like
we were preparing is, how do you
suss out like what's going to be
an issue with a WordPress site?
I suss it out by.
Do I have people who are
coming to me who care about it?
Who are like, this is a very important
instance for our community and you better
treat it well, Like this is our WordPress.
And so I feel like that's a very
good indicator that it's going
to be a very successful instance
because people care about it.
Anyway, that, that would be my
one kind of note, even beyond the
infrastructure and everything I do.
Do they have folks on the ground
who understand care and love it,
chatter.
Ronnie Burt: Definitely need a champion.
And, or more than one
for it to be successful.
You reminded me of a funny story.
We had a cluster with multiple
clients on the cluster.
And every day at 7am it would go down.
For weeks, and weeks.
7am, it's going down.
We couldn't figure it out.
It would have come back
up after five minutes.
It turns out multiple institutions
had bought this same service that
restarted the computers on every
desktop in the University at 7 a m.
and turned them on, and they
all opened up the website, their
main website, at that time.
So every computer on campus, on multiple
campuses was opening up their website
within the exact same second and it
would just crash and we had to figure out
Jim Groom: troubleshoot
Ronnie Burt: we stagger
this please a little
Jim Groom: that, Ronnie?
That's,
Ronnie Burt: it took a long time we were
about to lose customers that were mad it
was, it's now funny but it was not funny.
Jim Groom: I can imagine.
I feel your pain.
Jesse Friedman: Yeah, that's a wild one.
Very good.
All right.
So as we come to an end here, I'll
say to anybody at home, if you have
any questions for myself or Jim,
for Ronnie, feel free to go to the
website and submit a question there.
And then Jim and Ronnie, why don't you
tell us where folks can follow you?
What websites are important?
If if anybody wants to hire
Reclaim Hosting, where do they go?
If they want to learn more about
Gravatar, where do they go?
Jim, why don't you go first?
Jim Groom: I have a blog at bavaTuesdays.
com.
And then if you were interested in
Reclaim Hosting, and I thank you, Jesse,
for that plug, we're at reclaimhosting.
com and we really do focus on higher ed.
That's where we come from and
what we do and what we know.
If you're interested and
that's your bag, come see us.
Jesse Friedman: Awesome.
Ronnie Burt: And I'm easy i'm at gravatar.
com slash ronnie r o N i e and actually
our mission is very similar with owning
a space on the web that's just for you.
We let you bring your own
domain into now, so that's fun.
Jesse Friedman: That's great.
We're going to have to do a
separate episode about Gravatar.
And if anybody's interested
at home go check out Gravatar.
It's a really amazing way to create
a quick link in bio, but then also
tie your social media, your avatar
to services across the web so that
you can sync those up and only
have to update them in one place.
Cool.
All right.
thank you both for joining another
episode of Impressive Hosting.
All right.
That was a great conversation
with Jim and Ronnie.
We talked about higher education and
the needs that those institutions
have for managed WordPress hosting.
A couple takeaways from that conversation.
First off, I loved Jim's thought process
around a domain of one's own and the
empowerment that gives to students, the
ability that it gives them to carve out a
little bit of the internet for themselves.
What he specifically mentioned
was the idea that they would have
the ability to narrate their work.
And I love that because of the, when
you're in an educational situation
where you're trying to learn being able
to reflect on what it is that you're
learning and to explain it to others.
Whether that's through a verbal situation
in a classroom or online where you're
blogging or writing about your work.
It's a great opportunity
for self expression.
It's a great opportunity for you to
learn the information even better.
And as I said, in that episode, when
you learn, when you teach you end
up learning the content a lot more.
So that's something
that really spoke to me.
And I think it's core to the mission
of open web and open source as a whole,
in general, the idea that everyone
has the right to create content.
And to express themselves on it.
The other thing that we got into
there was the seasonality of traffic
influxes for higher education.
I thought that was really interesting.
I know that most of us think about
Black Friday or other sales times
as an opportunity for us to get
ahead of possible complications
with e-commerce websites, you want
to talk to your clients about it.
You want to get an understanding of how
much traffic they're going to be getting
and be ready to compensate for that.
But as someone who even as a
professor, I didn't always think
about the idea that there was an
influx of traffic because students
were all signing up at the same time.
That first week of the first semester,
I would imagine, would be incredibly
taxing on any kind of infrastructure.
Which actually leads us
to the last takeaway.
Something that we didn't get to explore
as much as I had hoped on the episode,
but I think it's worth discussing, is
how you scale these types of setups.
Coming from WP Cloud where we focus
on real time scaling, vertical scaling
using pooled resources and the ability
to allocate additional resources in real
time, I think is really important for
institutions in higher ed, especially
since they need to be able to ramp up
and provide resources in real time for
students who are trying to get their lives
going, trying to get into classes, trying
to get everything going for themselves.
And at those points it can
be quite stressful for them.
Having to deal with infrastructural
issues and problems with that's really
complicated and a pain for those students.
The other thing that is really
interesting that I think is worth
exploring more, and I think we'll do a
follow up episode in higher education
is around unpacking a multi site.
As we discovered with Jim, multi site
is still a really great opportunity for
folks who are managing thousands of sites.
To take out a lot of the complications
that go along with management
of that large pool of websites.
But at the same time, there are
opportunities out there to increase
performance lockdown security even
more and do that through a network
of sites that aren't necessarily
tied together like a multi site.
WP Cloud, for example, offers the ability
for You to tie in the development flows
into the updating of WordPress core and
plugins and themes so you can update.
Thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds
of thousands of sites across your
WP Cloud account simultaneously.
The use of plugins allow for role
management and SSOing of students
and others to log in and manage their
accounts across a network of sites.
So I don't think that we necessarily
need to think of multi site as
the only opportunity out there
anymore to compensate for or to
manage thousands of websites.
Tools like WP cloud allow for
you to do that seamlessly.
So it's something worth
exploring and something we'll
take on in the next episode.
Thanks for listening.
