First off, for full disclosure, I used to work in the group at UMW that Reclaim sprang from, so I know some of them both professionally and personally. I left before Reclaim launched, but was in the primordial soup that gave rise to it.

My experience with Reclaim, and what I've heard from everyone who uses it is that they are _very_ responsive to particular needs, and genuinely want to help education institutions make things just work. (When I'm at DH conferences and anyone asks about hosting options, there's near-unanimous support for Reclaim, though those are usually smaller projects -- a bit different from your case)

I think Jason's advice is good -- get a sense of current bandwidth for your institution -- then directly ask Reclaim how that compares to other accounts they are currently hosting. I'm pretty sure that they'll come back with an honest evaluation. You might even be able to save yourself a little work if you start with that question to Reclaim about bandwidth scale they currently handle, and if that number seems an order of magnitude above your general estimate, feel safe. If it's not that big a difference and there are lingering worries, then do the measurements Jason suggests and send that data back to Reclaim for their thoughs

Hope that helps,
Patrick


Patrick Murray-John

Associate Director for Systems

Digital Scholarship Group, Snell Library

Northeastern University

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________________________________
From: Code for Libraries <[log in to unmask]> on behalf of Jason Sherman <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, September 12, 2019 7:41 PM
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Reclaim Hosting

I periodically do contract work for an educational company that uses
reclaim. In this case the contract was for dedicated hardware to which the
edu company has whm and cpanel access.

Since you're specifically concerned about the network side of things, I'd
recommend to start logging the bytes transferred out from your
current system, if you aren't already doing so. You could then ask your
institution about what underlying infrastructure is being provided by
reclaim. That will hugely impact performance. They offer lots of
flexibility in terms of what infrastructure is powering your cpanel-based
services.

Ultimately, the educational company decided to move its heaviest-usage
production infrastructure off to aws because of inconsistent performance as
more services were added to the hosting account and some services scaled
up. The whole point of cpanel is to allow users to spin up arbitrary
services without technical barriers, which can make it very difficult to
offer predictability in the shared environment. They still have their
lightweight public/sales sites and their sandbox systems with reclaim and
have been quite happy with that.