 Welcome, everyone, last session of the last day of Domains 101. We're excited to be here. We're talking about beyond domains, no lampshade. So we're going to talk about things that you can't or that you may think aren't compatible with domains. And how does that fit? How do those applications or anything like that? How does that fit into domains? Talk about different use cases and all that stuff. But before we even get into what you can't do or what you might not have thought you can do or what you might not have thought about, we kind of have to define the boundaries we've set ourselves here in. So Domain 101 Zone and Shared Hosting had reclaimed. And frankly, most companies that offer shared with web hosting services are using what's like industry-wide known as the LAMP stack. And LAMP is an acronym that stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, and Perl. And sometimes Python. Sometimes Python, but kind of rarely Python. But it feels like anyway. So I'm just kind of. Dammit, you're right, Taylor. Just kind of mentioning here. And I pulled this up. I just Googled like LAMP stack. And I found this IBM page. So we're in the realm of international business machines, so you know we're correct, probably. So they define LAMP as Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. Like I said, usually Perl as well, almost always. But Perl isn't given as much love. So sometimes people forget it in the acronym. But what does that mean? Linux is the operating system that the server is running. So it needs to be an application that can run on Linux. We're talking about what you can run in a LAMP stack. So what can you run on shared hosting or domain in one's own? Needs to be Linux compatible. Apache is the web server. Apache is like a prolific piece of software at this point in terms of what it can do, what it enables for the web. It's very much tied into open source in terms of establishing like licensing. It's kind of wild. We use it and shared hosting uses it because it's really efficient and good at allowing a lot of people to do a lot of different things all on one server, which allows you to do things in an economical way from in terms of resources. So Apache can handle all kinds of different web pages, all kinds of different applications. But there are some limitations. Applications you run need to be written with Apache in mind at least or be compatible with. And some applications aren't that way. MySQL is the database. So it's just one type of database. There's all kinds of other databases. MySQL is probably one of the most popular databases in the world in terms of how many instances it's running. But again, are some features that it may or may not provide or implement differently than things like Postgres or I don't know, like Heaven Forbid, like Oracle SQL or something proprietary. So your application that you're running also needs to be compatible with MySQL. And then finally, PHP is the programming language that if your application is written with a programming language, maybe you're just doing static HTML or something, then you're not concerned about it. But if you're running a CMS WordPress, you probably need some programming language available to you. PHP and Perl are typically the choices for a lot of reasons that are somewhat historical, somewhat based on performance and managing multiple things running. But basically, this is the structure that you have available to you if you want to run an application. So what that results in is a lot of applications available to you, but not every single possible web application. So what we're wanting to talk about is like, what if the application you want to run doesn't work with say Apache or PHP or MySQL or something like that. We aren't gonna talk about things that don't work with Linux just because I, and I don't, Jim, I don't know if you do, but I don't have any experience with like Windows Server stuff. That's a whole other world, but there are some services that you may wanna run maybe on a different cloud or something that run not on Linux. But even outside of this, there are still a lot of kind of cool and creative things you can do with Domino One's own or shared hosting. Before we even get into some of the more advanced stuff, the first thing I wanna mention is that there's a lot of stuff you can do with just DNS basically. So I'm here on my shared hosting account, but this worked the same on any Domino One's own account. Say, I've got Taylor.stateu.org. I'm on jaden.me over here, but keep in mind that you can always make a lot of things happen with just DNS. So if you're using, if say you have someone that wants to use a service like GitHub Pages and they wanna map a domain to it because they're using something like like Jekyll or something like that, GitHub Pages has documentation on mapping a custom domain. And they could easily follow this guide and use the DNS tools available in C-Panel to hook up maybe a subdomain or something to GitHub Pages. You can also do a lot of real simple things with subdomain. So I use subdomains all the time to, in fact, I've got probably too many, to just do redirects. So maybe you've got a need to link to like a special conference site. Let's say this one. So we're on watch.reclaimed.tec slash d-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o one Oone dash fall 22. Maybe you've got like a really long, like a super long NURL and you, would use something like Bitly, but you want to make a nicer looking link that you have more control over. Maybe I wanna make domains.jedem.me, go to that site. I can go into C-Panel, go to subdomains, pick create, wait for it to do the DNS and the page magic in the background Then once that's created, I can actually go in here and set up a redirect right from here. So it says not redirected and go to manage redirection, paste in my link, and now domains.jd.me should go to our watch site. There we go. Inception. Yeah. I think that maybe that's underappreciated how easy that is. I think a lot of people don't even know that that's an option. But it is a thing. I've seen folks hook up like all kinds of services via DNS. You can do mail services. You could do other web hosting services if you really want to. But there's all kinds of things you can do. But Jim, do you want to take us into the next generation? Sure, absolutely. I'll take a moment and just say, there was an article I think you shared, and I shared it in Distance Gord, and it actually is by a site called TDM and it talks about the long really invaluable history of LAMP as a sturdy infrastructure for folks to use. I think there's a lot there. Even seeing you do the redirects and talk a bit about the title, I Love LAMP. It is a great article if you're interested in that history and how the stack came together. It's been really the default stack from much of the web for well over 20 years. And for that, it's a very powerful thing, maybe even more. So well worth a read if you're interested. But the thing about LAMP that I've always loved and you pointed to is the ability, in particular with C-Panel, which is the flavor of LAMP that is branded to give us a GUI interface so we can do stuff like redirects is domains and DNS. So let's just say you have a domain and you're running it in LAMP and the application you wanna run, and I'm gonna actually share my screen. Well, I'm not gonna actually share my screen. I'm just gonna go and put it behind me. And I don't know, did I already mention my Ant-Man abilities? I probably have, because I like to talk about, oh, there it is. It's like Ant-Man, but instead of a factor of thousands, it's a factor of like one or two. Thank you for diminishing my superpower. You're welcome. As I diminish myself. This is a good example, and we're talking about the next generation apps like you mentioned. This is Reclaim Hosting's monthly newsletter. Driven brilliantly by Pilot. And this is a collection of all the work we've done in announcements, et cetera. And this is running in an application called Ghost. Now, Ghost, if we do a lot of, and Tim, the co-founder and my partner actually figured out a way to get it run in C-Panel, but it was so hard that it was kind of, unless you were a programmer, it was next to impossible. And it was difficult to maintain over time too for folks to update and stuff like that. So you could pull a Rube Goldberg and get some of these apps running in LAMP, but at the point of supporting this for a community, it became impossible. And Lauren can attest to this as well when people would come to us and say, can we run Ghost? Can we run discourse? Can we run dataset? Can we run, in the applications people would keep coming to us, can we run Shiny apps? And we would be like, no, because it doesn't run in C-Panel. No, no, we would be saying no a lot. And so what we did, and the we is royal, because Tim really did, it found this service that we use driven by Jelastic, which is now Virtuo. So, which is actually basically an alternative stack that runs not only PHP apps, but runs Ruby apps, Node apps, Go apps. And I don't wanna get too much into the kind of app soup, but the idea is these are applications that would have dependencies that would not work in the LAMP environment. And Ghost is one of them. And it actually runs brilliantly on Reclaim Cloud, even to the point where Taylor built a really elegant one-click installer. So it's almost like having an installatron-like access to these next generation apps. And we firmly believe that this will be the kind of future of allowing these open source, because they're often open source, not only apps that can run not in just PHP LAMP environments, but in a whole host of environments, Java, Ruby, as I said, Node, et cetera. So we're super excited about that. Ghost is one example. And this is kind of, I know it's gonna be, but this is kind of what the dashboard looks like. If you're more interested in containers and Reclaim Cloud, Taylor drove a really great understanding containers session that we have video recordings of. That is really a great overview of what this means and how to run it. I run not only stuff like Ghost, Dataset, which is a small app that data analysts love, but also one of, I think Taylor and I's favorite tool. It's kind of a YouTube clone, and it's called PeerTube. And it's an open source video management tool that allows you to upload videos. And it's a one-click install in Reclaim Cloud. It runs on a fairly complicated stack that you could never run in LAMP in a million years. And it would be terrible performance if it was. Exactly. It would either be slow itself or slow everything else on the server down. So it's tools like PeerTube, it's tools like Ghost, these what we'll call next generation apps, although they've been around for a while now, that makes stuff beyond the LAMP exciting. But the DNS piece that you pointed to, and I will redirect it back to you Taylor, because I know you have stuff to share, is crucial because you can still have C-Panel app and more efficiently run PHP apps. But at the point where you wanna run, videos.jimgroom.com or whatever your domain is, you can actually point that DNS to an instance, whether it's on Reclaim Cloud, DigitalOcean, or some other app-based hosting provider. It really does change the way in which you think about C-Panel, not only is it a place to host your apps, but also is a place to route to the apps that you're running in a variety of places. So I do love not only DNS and the ability there, but the idea of being able to say yes to folks when they come to us and say, can we run this, can we run that? Unless it's on a Windows server like you said, we don't say no that much anymore, which is, it's quite nice. Yeah, I think it's a great thing to think about in terms of, we've said like next generation hosting and stuff like that. And I think that's not a perfect metaphor in the term of, and we talk a lot about this, I think at Reclaim and we sometimes get that question from folks of like, well, like I see Reclaim Cloud can do all of these things. And of course it can host a LAMP stack. In fact, if you're like, if you're a domain of one's own school, there's like a decent chance that your domain of one's own is hosted in our own cloud, right? Yeah, exactly. But I don't think it's fair to think of this as a replacement, right? Because I personally would not bet against LAMP for a lot of different reasons in terms of longevity because I think this is really a compliment. Like you said, like it allows us not to say no, it allows us to do, it allows us to run these applications where a developer said, no, I don't wanna do this in PHP or it wouldn't be easy to do or possible or it needs more resources than are possible in the LAMP stack. But the flip side of that is important. For things that don't need a lot of server resources or could benefit from being on a server that's hosting many different things, you can't really beat the efficiency and commodity angle of a LAMP environment. Like we can host, you know, like say your domain of one's own server is provisioned for 500 accounts. Say you had that full at 500 accounts. The odds are that's thousands of websites, right? On one server, one large server, right? But one server, that's super efficient. I don't think the need or want to do things like that is going away, possibly ever. You know, the containers have a lot of benefits and allow us to run all kinds of applications but they do require just inherently by the way they work, they require more resources. So there is an efficiency aspect that I think is going to keep LAMP around for possibly longer than you or I will ever care about. You know? It's true. And I think one of the things there that's worth mentioning is a lot of times it is niche. Like there are niche research tools, there are niche, you know, needs that whether it's a digital humanist or a data analyst or whatever, they need this one thing. And the thing about Reclaim Cloud and the next generation sandbox, if we call it that, is a lot of times it's not always on like a LAMP stack. Totally. You can use it and, you know, cost 20 cents to do what you needed to do and then turn it off. And in that way, it has a very different on and off utility-like feel. Like you turn on the heat when you need it, turn it off and that's all you pay for. So I'm interested in that piece. I just think it's interesting to say LAMP and, right? Exactly. Rather than LAMP or. One thing I want to kind of show a quick here is, okay, well, that's, you know, conceptually we've kind of talked about why and in a little bit of how, but I want to mention like, well, what does that actually look like? Say I've deployed PeerTube, how do I map my domain to it and what does that actually look like? So here I've got one set up already that's a PeerTube instance. I mean, I'll kind of show that. Depending on time wise here, I'm going to try another one here as an example. So I'm going to get a ghost installer ready to go and so we can do this live here. You just want to show off your ghost installer. But I am going to potentially be racing against the clock here. So we're going to do this kind of two different ones. Let's do it. Ready? Go. So I'm going to make a ghost installer, or sorry, a ghost environment. We'll call it Taylor test domains 101. And we'll give it that environment. So that'll be the URL of it. I'll give it the same display name just because let's put it in, I don't know, put it in the UK. Why not? So I'm going to let that install and do its thing. But in the meantime, let's look at like my PeerTube here. I have a PeerTube install at video.jadend.me. And so there it is. Jadend.me is my main domain name. And so it's really nice that I can put this totally different application in a subdomain off of another application. Jadend.me, this site is hosted from cPanel and video.jadend.me running and reclaim without cloud. And to point out, not only is it a subdomain, I can also, of course, link to it, right? So I have a link on my main site to it as well. Just to kind of drive that point home of how these things can interoperate in a way that a person visiting doesn't need to know or care where things are hosted. So to make that video.jadend.me, I just grabbed after I had the site ready to go, like ready to use, I found its public IP address in the Reclaim Cloud interface. This is a little bit small, but, and I copied it. I went to my DNS zone editor in cPanel. I added a A record. Well, I'm not actually gonna do this because it already has an A record, but video test.jadend.me, let's say, and then I pasted the address in and I hit add an A record. You can also just go to manage here and actually show you this A record as it exists right now. So there it is. And if I ever say needed to make some changes or clone this environment in my video.jadend.me and I got a different IP address, I could actually just update the IP address and it would in place make that change in DNS. So that's what that actually looks like. But there's a lot of permutations of this that are slightly in different. So another good example here is perhaps role4cheese.com. So this is a domain I registered actually on Cloudflare to use for a DND group that I'm a part of. And we're running a application in Reclaim Cloud to power our weekly tabletop, basically it's a digital tabletop. This one's not handled in C-Panel at all in that particular case because I registered that domain elsewhere and I pointed an A record in Cloudflare in that case. So that's a totally, totally separate one. My point being you don't have to have your domain in Reclaim to point a domain in Reclaim Hosting's shared service or C-Panel or anything to use Reclaim Cloud, you could do something totally separate. In this case, I don't even own that domain, somebody else owns it. And I just helped them set up the record for it. And while Ghost is finishing up its install over here I've also got a radio station. So this one radio.jn.me, if you load it has this site and then my player embedded in this particular case. I don't even have the DNS mapped. This is actually just an iframe. So radio.jn.me is a ZuraCast that's hosted over here. It has the URL radio.ca.reclaim.cloud. And I simply have a subdomain made through the subdomain's feature but I'll show it off here in the file manager that actually is just pulling in the little player webpage via a iframe. And actually you blog this whole setup too if you're curious, but my point being that webpage while it looks like it's ZuraCast isn't even and it's actually a C-Panel hosted thing. So there are basically unlimited permutations of this stuff. So my point being if you're looking to mix and match this stuff and you're not sure how that's when you reach out and we can help you figure out what would be the smartest or easiest or best or whatever way that you're looking for. The kind of interesting thing with this the reason I did this ZuraCast install this way is this means I can actually turn off my own radio station save some money and if you go visit my webpage it still exists but just gives you a message that the station is down so it'll say streams currently offline. So all of those permutations like Jim was saying you can turn things off and change a DNS record or point things, all those options are options. So let's check out if we have any time left we have a little bit. So this is my ghost site that I just created. So it's just a basic blank site. I'll just go in and like set up the account on it just to give it a title. So test sites, that's the name. Do my email address in there, set a password. I'm actually really never gonna even log in so I don't care what that password is. Great, so the site is set up. And let me just go back to the homepage. But you'll notice that it is actually at Taylor testdomains101.uk.reclaim.cloud. Maybe I wanna map this to a new domain and I call it, I don't know, myghostsite.jdn.me I wanna use my main domain. Okay, so all I need is I need that IP address first. So I'm gonna get that from Reclaim Cloud. I'm gonna go on my C panel, go to the DNS zone editor. I'm gonna add a record under my jdn.me domain that I have here. Well, what did I say Taylor? Well, we'll do TaylorGhost.jdn.me paste in that record. So now DNS is set up to go there. However, we do need to let ghost know to expect connections basically. Because out of the box, if it gets traffic from like a place it doesn't expect kind of. But basically when your browser goes there, it's gonna say, hey, I'm looking for TaylorGhost.jdn.me and ghost is gonna go, I don't know that person or that and it'll deny the traffic. So we now just need to tell ghost to expect traffic from there. So we'll go to the add-ons menu in Reclaim Cloud. And this is specifically for our ghost and a couple other installers. Sometimes you have to look into the documentation of the particular app you're running to see how it wants you to make these types of changes. This is one of those advantages of lamp, right? As you can do a lot of this stuff in a standard way. But when you have developers using almost any programming stack, then these settings are done in different ways. So for ghost, we have a domain configuration tab. I'll do the change there. Now we just need to tell it the domain that I just set up, which I have already forgotten. I have TaylorGhost.jdn.me is the one I just set up. You can see I have a couple out of these. And then apply it. You might get in right under the bell. You might make it. We'll be even better as it works. I'll try to visit it. Oh, it's updating right now. After these messages. Gonna take a second because it's probably issuing certificates and things like that. Sometimes this takes a little bit. Yeah. The Nginx, if you do install ghost. There we go. There it is, yeah. Nice. So I was a little bit impatient with reloading it. You should wait at least 10 seconds before trying to load it. But yeah, so showing that first of all, I think DNS can be scary when you're new to it, but it doesn't have to be. And if you have questions, just ask. We can help you figure out that stuff before you make those changes. So, but it lets you do really powerful things in mixing and matching your tools, where they're hosted, all that kind of stuff. Yeah. And it's funny because you brought up Cloudflare on DNS. And I hadn't thought about it before this session, but there's something like when you go to we'll call it the next generation, like Sandbox, where you're using stuff beyond LAMP, given LAMP has become the standard. One of the things you start to realize is, one of the trickiest piece of that is knowing how to point your domain or a subdomain of your domain to that app. And once that connection is made, you could use a tool like Cloudflare or DNS Manager in C-Panel to manage a whole fleet of different apps in different spaces with the DNS really being the glue that integrates it. And that's simply just a link, right? So, in some ways, it goes back to the link nature of the web. Totally, totally, it absolutely does. And that's the thing that is like, once you realize that potential, you realize that there's a reason why DNS is complicated is because it needs to offer those use cases. Those are important, right? Like we have some schools that have domain of one's own that are on a subdomain of their main EDU, right? Like I used, like for example, UNF has domains.unf.edu. If the DNS system didn't work the way it did, they wouldn't be able to set up domain of one's own as a subdomain like that. Other schools have a custom domain that may be that like, for instance, SNC has night dot domains and that's where the domain of one's own is. That flexibility enables people to make those choices in whatever way makes sense for them or their project or their institution or whatever. It is a little bit complicated DNS, but ask those questions so we can help. And I'll say once you do this once or twice, it doesn't seem as complicated. I think the main thing I always got me when I first started making DNS changes is the caching thing, knowing that when you make a change that your browser and your computer and your network and your ISP even hang on to what it thinks the state is and for a time that you can't always control. So sometimes when you make a change you have to wait for it to go through properly depending on how you did it. That's the only thing that can be a little bit nerve wracking. It's a good piece of literacy to DNS whether it's C panel or LAMP stack or beyond. Like DNS does remain a consistent piece to understand. So as you're trying to support whether it's faculty, students and staff one of the things to kind of think about and maybe dig into a little bit is how does DNS work and how can it work for you? So super cool. Maybe this is not about LAMP shades at all. Maybe it's all about DNS in the end. Yeah, there's an article. Different shades of LAMP. Shades of LAMP? Oh, no. I'll have to link if I can find it in the article in and I'll put it in Discord if I can find it. But there's a what is like how does DNS work kind of thing? And it's really just, you know, it's like a network of computers asking each other effectively, but it's a hierarchy. Right there? Yeah, do you know about this? Nah, I'll ask Billy Bob if they know. And it goes down the line until somebody knows and then that's why the caching works the way it does. And once you kind of see that, at least once I saw that visually laid out, I was like, ah, I mean, I'm not gonna pretend to be an expert at this, but I do understand why sometimes I can load something. And the perfect example is say you're about to map a ghost site like I just did. Let's say I was like, huh, I should do ghost.jadon.me. And you may have noticed as I was setting up, I actually already had that one set up before. If I would have modified that one, it's very likely that when I visited it, it wouldn't have worked immediately because we probably would have had to wait half an hour, hour, maybe even two hours for an existing record to be changed. And the same thing can happen for new records in certain cases if someone's tried to visit them before. So it can be a little bit tricky, but that's what our support is for. We can help you kind of navigate that and it's powerful. So. Totally. Cool. Awesome. Well, it was great to step out of LAN for a second and look beyond. Yes. Yeah, like I said, we should have made some kind of bed bath and beyond. You know, maybe, maybe. But I don't have enough time. Yeah, we don't have enough time. All right. That's beyond domains, no lampshade. And that's the end of day two and that's the end of domains 101. So really thankful to have everyone who is able to participate. Maybe you're watching this later. If you have questions, post them in the Discord channel where we'll still be hanging out there or you can post them anywhere in our Discord or our support or support forums, all kinds of things we can help you with, all kinds of places to get help. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, the bell. We hit the bell. That's, there we go. It's not a workshop without one. So we'll see everybody later. It's been real. Thank you all.