Blondie’s Parallel Lines photoshoot

With the move of Reclaim Hosting’s infrastructure to DigitalOcean, we’ve had to retire fewer and fewer shared hosting servers. For us there is a natural cycle of students and faculty that sign-up for a class or project and a fair number no longer need the space after the class or project is done, which means there content is ultimately removed and we can keep using those servers without overcrowding. It’s a lot more sustainable than our previous setup with ReliableSite, and it means we have to add fewer shared hosting servers than previously. That said, the need still arises and given we’ve had to retire a bunch of servers like ramones, minutemen, huskerdu, unwound, etc. it’s nice to be able to reclaim the classics and bring them back to life—it’s like the inevitable “re-united and it feels so good” tour for servers. We actually started this in June with our last shared hosting server Fugazi and even followed up in August with a revival of our very first server Clash (just now realizing I never blogged that one!) so when Tim was inquiring about our next server name I just happened to be listening to Blondie‘s 1978 masterpiece Parallel Lines in Reclaim Video.

Instagram Photo

To get even further in the weeds, neither Fugazi nor Blondie were previously shared hosting servers, rather they were the hostnames of the dedicated servers we were using on ReliableSite to manage several virtualized instances of Domain of One’s Own (DoOO) for schools using Solus. We quickly stopped naming DoOO servers after bands given how hard it was becoming to remember what band maps to what school, and simply named the server after the school. So the new shared hosting server names are actually ones that never really saw the light of day because they were effectively wrappers for a group of virtual private servers for various schools. There are a few others of this variety that we need to revive as well, namely Sonic Youth, the Replacements, and GenX. There ‘s  strange consistency and persistence to it all, at least in my mind. And now that there is even a pattern emerging, Fugazi (DoOO VPS server) then Clash (our first shared hosting server) then Blondie (another DoOO VPS server) the next server name has to be a throwback to the OG shared hosting servers, and I have a good idea which one. What’s in a name? Everything.

I care, but I don’t care that you don’t know!