You will lose access to your Create Digital domain as early as six months 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 $30/year 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. Through our special partnership with them, you’re eligible to have your domain and content automatically migrated to a full hosting account at a 10% discount. Just sign up for your own domain and they’ll do the migration for you. You won’t have to provide any login information since they control the servers on both sides. We have this migration option built right in to Create Digital, but you can check out their website for more information: Reclaim Hosting Migrations
To sign up for your own Reclaim Hosting domain:
1. Login to usccreate.org
2. In the top navigation menu, go to Manage Your Account, then Migration Information
3. Click Get Started in the Migration Offer box.
4. You will be given the option to 1) register a new domain, 2) transfer your domain from another registrar, or 3) use your existing domain and update your nameservers.
If you haven’t purchased hosting from somewhere else, the Register a new domain option allows you to get your own personal domain with Reclaim Hosting (outside of Create Digital). Your site will no longer be located at “yoursite.uofscreate.org” and you’ll be able to purchase a new URL.
If you have purchased (or intend to purchase) a URL from a different hosting company, but still want your site to be hosted with Reclaim Hosting, select the I will use my existing domain and update my nameservers option. Your site will be migrated to a personal Reclaim Hosting account, but then you will have to update the information that tells the other hosting company (that you got your URL from) where your site is located. It’s possible to get your hosting and URL from two separate companies, but it’s often easier and cheaper to get them together.
If you already have a site that’s hosted somewhere else, and want to transfer everything to a personal Reclaim Hosting account, select Transfer your domain from another registrar.
5. Once you select an available domain (consider using your name for a professional site), we recommend adding on ID Protect by checking the ID Protection checkbox.
6. On the next page, you’ll see an order confirmation and you’ll then be required to enter your account details to officially purchase your hosting plan.
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.