For the last 3-4 years, I have been maintaining several developmental servers on the Amazon Cloud. I don’t even remember what my first server was, whether it was a Moodle, a WordPress Blog, or Pressbooks. It’s sometimes interesting that one of the most formative experiences of my career may have been a job that I didn’t get. I had interviewed at a prestigious New York Liberal Arts college to manage their Domain of One’s Own program.

I spent weeks preparing for that interview. By the time I walked into the interview, I had studied the history of Domain of One’s Own. I had practiced creating and tearing down servers using Digital Ocean and templates from Bitnami, and I was running a WHM server that could act as a hub for activity. I didn’t get the job. I spent too much time talking about the student experience when the administrators had already decided to limit access to just their faculty at first, and they didn’t want someone to bootstrap it together, they had already contracted with a vendor to provide their services.

It didn’t stop me from learning a lot from the experience though, and I always wanted to have a Domains initiative. My wish came through with SUNY Create! I still kept running my own servers however, at first on a free student account, and later just paying the monthly bill.

At one point I had 5 servers running on the Amazon Cloud (WordPress, Moodle, Pressbooks, OpenLab), but today I closed down my last one after migrating it to Reclaim Hostings servers. I am glad I had the experience working with AWS, because I feel like it makes me appreciate and understand the tools I have available in a cPanel just a little bit better. For someone who tinkered for an evening to get their settings just right to get a certificate and enable HTTPS on a website, you really appreciate it when cPanel does it for you on install, or you can issue one easily from the Let’s Encrypt plugin. I built my first Pressbooks server as part of a graduate seminar in technology, and it eventually led to a contract with SUNY OER Services because I had the big picture view of the application, from installation, upgrades, and lots of experience as an end-user. I still think I learn the most from when I break something and then have to fix it, and I learned a lot from trying to manage those servers from the command line.

I’m looking forward to not having to work that hard in the future!