You will lose access to your MiddCreate domain six months after you graduate (or otherwise discontinue) from Middlebury. You can keep everything exactly the same while you still have access to your Middlebury email, which is for 6 months after graduation. However, when you lose access to your Middlebury email, you no longer have access to your MiddCreate cPanel.

You then have a number of options, with the ultimate goal to transition your account to one that is no longer managed by Middlebury or connected to your Middlebury email. 

The easiest option is to migrate your site off of MiddCreate directly to Reclaim Hosting. This option keeps everything exactly the same on the back end, but just moves your content over automatically from the MiddCreate servers to the Reclaim Hosting Customer servers. Reclaim Hosting will give you the option to purchase your own domain name (so it will no longer be yourdomain.middcreate.net) and it will migrate the site for you – easy peasy. You don’t have to do any of the migration work yourself. After that point, your contact for troubleshooting will be “support@reclaimhosting.com.” The most popular plan through Reclaim is $30/year for 2GB of space, which is a very competitive deal.

Other options are to download your entire site to store on your computer, move everything over to another hosting provider, or—if you use WordPress—to export your site’s content, import it to WordPress.com for free, and re-do some of the formatting that doesn’t transfer over. (More info here.)

Using Reclaim Hosting

MiddCreate 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 for free for the first year. See this link for more details.

Just sign up for your own domain, submit a support ticket, 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.

To sign up for your own Reclaim Hosting domain:

1. Login to middcreate.net.

2. Go to Migration Information under Manage Your Account in the top navigation menu.

3. Click on 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 your site’s URL ends in middcreate.net, and you have never used a different URL or purchased hosting from somewhere else, the Register a new domain option allows you to get your own personal domain with Reclaim Hosting (outside of MiddCreate). Your site will no longer be located at “yoursite.middcreate.net” 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.

Other Hosting Providers

If you don’t want to continue with Reclaim and would rather use a different hosting company, you can download all your site files independently, purchase a URL, and upload the files to your new domain through FTP.

If you’ve built a great website at SITES dot MIIS or SITES dot Middlebury but want to customize it beyond the available options, you can transfer it to MiddCreate. Using your own domain on MiddCreate gives you full creative control over your site’s appearance and the flexibility to add new functionality. In addition, MiddCreate domains are hosted through Reclaim Hosting, which provides a convenient migration service so you can keep your site after you leave.

Caution: All the content and media contained within your posts and pages can be migrated, but files in your Media Library, your theme, and any appearance settings will not transfer to your new WordPress site. You will have to set these up again once you migrate your content.

Export Your Site

Go to sites.mis.edu or sites.middlebury.edu and sign in to your account. Go to My Sites and click on the dashboard of the site you want to migrate.

Click on Tools > Export in the toolbar to the left. Select what you want to transfer, then download the export file.

Install WordPress on your MiddCreate domain and go to your WordPress dashboard. You may want to delete the automatically generated example posts and pages (e.g. the “Hello world!” post).

Import Your Site

In your MiddCreate WordPress dashboard, go to Tools > Import in the toolbar on the left. Choose WordPress from the list of systems.

Click on Choose File and select the file you exported from SITES dot. Then upload the file and import it.

You will be asked to assign authors to the posts or pages you import. You can choose to keep and display the authors’ names from the SITES dot version of your content or change them to something else. Remember to update the passwords and roles of imported users once the migration is completed. If you want to keep the file attachments (image, video, document, etc. files uploaded into your posts from the post edit screen), be sure to check the import attachments box before you click Submit.

Congratulations! The migration is complete and you can start customizing your new site on MiddCreate.