Why Reclaim Hosting is important

possibly Jim and Tim at work running Reclaim Hosting. Or some other guys.
Edtech (and tech in general) is largely hostile to humans. It has evolved to try to lock people in so that data about them can be sold and resold. This is why Reclaim Hosting is so important – Jim nails it with a mini-manifesto for the company:

Tim and I aren’t “businessmen” (though I joke about it), we’re edtechs who have an intimate understanding of higher ed. We have a strong sense of where technology and teaching converge in interesting ways, and remain committed to augmenting what we’ve helped build at UMW and share it far and wide.

We don’t advertise. We don’t use our interface to play psychological games. We don’t hate-sell through fear and uncertainty as so many in the web hosting world do. We don’t and won’t take VC funding. We won’t be bought, which means we won’t sell you out. And while we do have the best service and cheapest prices around, more than anything we have an ethos that is rooted in the vision of helping people understand how the web works and use that knowledge to return teaching and learning to the scale of the individual—the only way it can be done right. That is what education is, and that is what we are all about.

(emphasis mine) – look for any other edtech company that makes a strong statement for its users. Few and far between. I’ve been happily hosting all of my own stuff with Reclaim Hosting since day 1. Best hosting ever, paired with some really fantastic people running the show.