Introducing RefBytes Cloud for Omeka

We have been hosting and maintaining Omeka installations for institutions for a while now, and the same conversation kept happening. Someone would ask us to look at their site, we would find it four versions behind, and the reason was never negligence. It was that upgrading meant SFTP, a maintenance window, and a person confident enough to do it. Those three things rarely line up.

RefBytes Cloud is our answer to that. It is managed hosting for Omeka Classic and Omeka S, built so the routine maintenance that keeps a collection healthy stops depending on anyone finding an afternoon.

Both platforms, one dashboard

The decision we made early, and the one that shapes everything else, was to support Classic and S equally rather than picking a side.

Institutions genuinely run both. There is a Classic site from 2016 that works fine, has an audience, and has no business being migrated. There is a new project on S because that is where new work belongs. Both need upgrades, backups, certificates, and someone paying attention.

Running those on separate infrastructure means two sets of requirements and two admin interfaces to remember. In RefBytes Cloud they are rows in the same list. You upgrade a Classic plugin and an S module from the same screen, with the same button.

Upgrades you click

Platform, module, and theme upgrades happen through the dashboard. No server access, no file transfers, no maintenance window that you schedule and then dread.

Underneath, each upgrade takes a database backup first — automatically, every time, not as an option you remember to tick. If something goes sideways, the restore point is from thirty seconds ago rather than last night.

We also run scheduled backups independently of upgrades, because the thing that damages a collection is at least as often a bad bulk edit as a bad release.

Your domain, your certificate

Every site gets a temporary subdomain immediately, which is useful for building before launch or for testing an upgrade against a copy.

When you are ready, add your own domain and enable SSL from the dashboard. The certificate provisions and renews itself. It should never be a task on anyone's calendar, and on our platform it is not.

Modules and themes without a cap

You can install any module or theme in the Omeka directory, as many as you want. We do not meter them and we do not maintain an approved list.

The one limitation today is that everything has to come from the directory — support for uploading your own or unlisted community modules is in progress. If you have custom work you need running now, tell us and we will sort it out in the meantime.

Real accounts for real teams

You can add admin users to your account so colleagues have their own logins. Collections are collaborative, and a shared password is not a permissions model.

What is coming

Site templates are the next significant thing. The use case that keeps coming up is a class: an instructor needs fifteen student sites with the same modules and the same theme, and building them one at a time is nobody's idea of a good afternoon. Templates will let you define a site once and stamp out as many as you need.

Uploading your own modules and themes is the other one, as mentioned above.

What we are not doing

A few things worth stating plainly, because a launch post is a good place to be clear about limits.

We do not lock up your data. Full exports of your database and files are yours to take, without a ticket or a fee. Digital collections outlive vendor relationships and the software should reflect that.

We do not resell your sites to third parties, and we ask that you do not either — the platform is for sites belonging to your own organization.

We do not pretend that managed hosting is right for everyone. If you have technical staff who enjoy running servers, you may be better served doing exactly that. What we offer is worth paying for when staff time is the scarce resource, which for most of the institutions we talk to, it is.

Getting started

There is a free trial and it does not want a credit card. Spin up a site, install a theme, put a few items in, and see whether the workflow suits you. If you already have a collection somewhere else, talk to us about moving it — migrations are something we do, and doing one badly is worse than not doing it at all.

And if you are still deciding between Classic and S, that is a conversation we are happy to have first. We wrote about how to think it through a few months ago, and the offer stands: we have no stake in which one you choose.