You will lose access to your Create Digital domain after you graduate (or otherwise discontinue) from the University of South Carolina, so it’s essential that you back up your site content prior to leaving campus. You have a number of options: pay Reclaim Hosting to keep everything and migrate to your own domain, download your entire site to store on your computer, or move everything over to another hosting provider.
Using Reclaim Hosting
Create Digital is hosted through Reclaim Hosting, a company that started out of the University of Mary Washington. If you are leaving the college, you can migrate your webspace from Create Digital to our hosting provider, Reclaim Hosting. Detailed instructions can be found here.
Downloading a Backup of Your Site
If you’re not sure what you’d like to do with your website or content, you can download a full backup directly from your cPanel. This would also be the route to take if you’re migrating your site to a hosting provider other than Reclaim.
1. Log into cPanel.
2. Head to the Files section of cPanel, click on the Backup icon.
3. Under Full Backup, click Generate/ Download a Full Website Backup.
4. On the next page, select the Home Directory option from the Backup Destination drop-down menu.
5. For Email Address, select whether or not you wish to receive an email notification once the backup is complete. (You may also change the notification email address in the provided field if you wish.) Click Generate Backup.
6. Consider storing your backup in multiple places, like on a flash drive, on your computer’s hard drive, and also in a cloud-based account.
7. Contact your new hosting provider for instructions on how to transfer your content.
WordPress
If you would like to move your WordPress site from your Create Digital account to either a free WordPress.com account or a different paid host, you can do so with the export system built into WordPress. Please see Exporting from WordPress.