DoOO vs Shared Hosting

#1

ReclaimHosting’s main page has a product tab that lists three distinct products available under the products tab on their main page:

  1. Shared Hosting
  2. Managed software hosting
  3. Domain of One’s Own

I’m trying to make sure that I understand the distinction between these products - particularly, the first and third.

My impression is that one signs up for Domain of One’s Own at the institutional level. That is a university signs up for it and then I, as a faculty member, could access it through that account. It appears that I can’t choose to sign up for Domain of One’s Own as an individual. Correct?

By contrast, it looks like individual faculty or students can sign up for Shared Hosting without the support of their university. For $50/year, an individual can get their own web space; a domain name can be purchased for another $15/year.

Through DoOO, it looks to me like my institution might allow me full SSH access to my space or it might restrict me to just cPanel access. Correct?

It also looks to me like the Shared Hosting plan allows domain names like:

but that DoOO restricts me to:

Is that true?

Finally, I don’t really have a sense of just how powerful ReclaimHosting’s servers are. I see that a Shared Hosting instance has 50GB of storage (SSD, I assume). How about RAM and number of CPUs? I’ve been maintaining my own webspace on Linode for five years now. Their cheapest plan is $5/month, which is comparable to ReclaimHosting, but I’ve found that I need a higher priced plan to get certain web applications to work smoothly. One thing that I appreciate about their pricing options is that they very clear delineate what you get for your money.

#2

Hi Mark,

Many of your assumptions are correct. Shared Hosting (Shared web hosting service - Wikipedia) is a tenant model where multiple individual users have accounts on a single server (very different from your Linode service where you have a virtual server of your own with its own memory and CPU stats). In this model we have a larger server and then allocate accounts that are shared on the system.

Regarding Domain of One’s Own this is indeed an institutional setup where we are providing a full server with the ability to provide shared account to their users to campuses and organizations. Subdomains like mychoice.myinstitutionchoice.com are a popular option but not a requirement, we do have schools like the University of Mary Washington where their students get top level domains in addition to a full cPanel through their school. Features like SSH and the like are controlled by the school as to whether they’re available or not. So for an individual user shared hosting would be the option you would go with if you were signing up at Reclaim Hosting whereas if you were with an institution that had Domain of One’s Own they have their own branded portal to access the service.

Let me know if you have any additional questions!

#3

Cool. The “tenant model” sounds potentially very useful - particularly, if it scales effectively and allocate resources as needed. Then, my questions surrounding CPU, etc become less relevant. A real test for that model would be if one tried to install a Jupyter notebook, which potentially allows a number of individuals (students, perhaps) to log on and run code.

My institution, UNCA, is planning a pilot run this Fall, and I’m a participant, so more questions are virtually assured. :slight_smile:

#4

OK - here’s an additional question: I’ve just transferred a domain I’ve owned for several years to ReclaimHosting via UNCA’s brand new DoOO. As someone who’s accustomed to DigitalOcean and Linode, I’ve discovered pretty quickly that the cPanel interface imposes some serious restrictions, even if SSH and SFTP access are available. So, I wonder:

Do accounts accessed via Shared Hosting necessarily use cPanel or is there the option for a purely command line, Linux based interface - a la DigitalOcean?

I do want to make it clear that I don’t intend to complain here. I can see the allure of cPanel and I think it’s likely fully appropriate the vast majority of university faculty who want to create an online presence. I was also quite happy with the migration process and the help I received. But, amongst the faculty of most universities, there will be a small but significant group who require more flexibility than cPanel can offer and I wonder if Reclaim has something to offer those folks, even if it’s outside of DoOO.

#5

Hi Mark,

As of now we don’t provide VPS services similar to Digital Ocean or Linode, and the simple reason being it would be hard to compete given how well they do it. In fact, once someone’s needs get to the point the want to use a VPS, I would point them to Digital Ocean, we use it ourselves. Trying to reproduce that infrastructure in-house for us would almost seem redundant given we try and focus in on a specific set of tools and possibilities for faculty and students.

Jim

#6

Jim - I think that’s quite understandable. One reason that ReclaimHosting might consider such a service, though, would be to simply offer a more complete package to schools that are often signing up to support their faculty at large. For someone like me at a university that is signing up for DoOO, it’s probably easier to convince my administration that I need a little more from a company that we already have a relationship and an account with than to talk them into signing me up with DigitalOcean.

#7

So what about that third product? On the webpage I see that you are offering Discourse, which is great, but I can’t find any more information about other software.

And the 100+ apps mentioned on the front page, which of the three products do they refer to?

#8

Hi @tophee,

Discourse is the only managed software hosting software available at Reclaim Hosting at this time.

The 100+ apps refer to the apps included in Installatron within a cPanel account. If you sign up for an account, you will have access to the following apps: http://installatron.com/apps. Please also note that Reclaim Hosting has built a few custom apps as well: OHMSViewer, Scalar, Grav, & Mukurtu.

#9

@tophee If you are interested in discussion forum software, like Discourse, then it might be worth mentioning that cPanel provides several other options for discussion fora.