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Review the Guidelines

Before you get started, we recommend that you review our information about Choosing a Domain Name.

The Sign-Up Process

Once you’ve reviewed the guidelines, you can proceed to the sign-up page.

1. Click the “Create” button
   
2. You will be redirected to log in for verification. You will use your Brown username and password to log in.
   
3. You are now ready to create a domain. To start, you must first sign up for a free subdomain (i.e., yoursite.digitalscholarship.brown.edu). Directions for purchasing a top-level domain (i.e. yourdomain.com) will be provided further down.

Option 1: Free Subdomain (Recommended)

For no cost, you can create a subdomain of digitalscholarship.brown.edu. This is the recommended way to proceed.

To create a free subdomain of digitalscholarship.brown.edu, leave this default option selected and enter the subdomain name you have chosen for your web presence. When you’ve found an available subdomain, click the  Continue button. For example, if you choose “yourdomain” as your subdomain, your full domain would be yourdomain.digitalscholarship.brown.edu.

Option 2: Buy a Top-Level Domain from Reclaim Hosting

It is easy to create your own top-level domain (a .com, .net or .org address). This allows you to select a URL for your website that is easy to remember and share.

While you are at Brown University, this is available for a nominal cost (currently $15/year). You can continue to use this domain after leaving Brown, although the cost may increase.

To register a top-level domain, log into your newly created cPanel, navigate to the Domains section, and click Register Top-Level Domain.

This panel offers a step-by-step guide to registering and adding a new top-level domain to your cPanel account.

Option 3: Connect an Existing Domain to Your cPanel

If you already have an existing domain that you’ve previously registered elsewhere, simply point your domain’s nameservers to ns1.reclaimhosting.com and ns2.reclaimhosting.com.

What exactly is FTP?

Get Information about Your FTP Account

Configure FTP in Your FTP Client

Choosing your domain name is the first step in getting started with staking your claim on the web. Your domain name is a unique web address (e.g. yourname.digitalscholarship.brown.edu) that can be used to build out your own digital presence. As you make your choice, there are a few considerations to keep in mind:

Your domain name must be available. Domain names must be unique, which means in order for you to claim your own, you need to be sure that it is currently available (and not being used by anyone else or any company or organization). There are many tools to check on domain availability; and the system checks your selection when you sign up for an account. If you’d rather spend some time thinking about your choice, you can always check domain availability here: whois.com.

Choose a domain you can live with. You should choose a domain name that you feel you can live with for quite some time. You should pick something that you won’t find embarrassing in the future. A good rule of thumb is to pick a domain that you would be comfortable putting on a future job application.

You may wish to include your name in your domain. There is no requirement that your domain reflects your specific identity in the form of your first and last name. However, choosing a domain name that includes your name may make it easier for you to achieve higher rankings in search engines when someone queries your real name.

Pick a domain you like. Your domain should reflect your work. It can reflect your research interests, projects, or it could simply be your name. The “right” domain for you is the one you’re comfortable with. If this is to be used for a project, you may want the domain name to represent the project.

To export your domain, you will first have to create a backup of both the files in your domain and the databases that your domain draws from.  First, click on the ‘Manage Your Account’ menu at the top of your screen and select ‘Migration Information.

1. To get started you’ll need to log in to your control panel (https://digitalscholarship.brown.edu/dashboard) using your Brown University username and password.
   
2. Once you’re logged in, you’ll see the cPanel interface.  Now click on the Manage Your Account menu at the top of your screen and select Migration Information.
   
3. To create a backup of your files and databases, simply click the button labeled Add Backup. The system will take a moment to create a backup. When it is complete, you will see the new backup appear below the button. You can click on this backup to download the file.
   

Web hosting is, at its basic core, files and folders on a computer that is connected to the internet and setup to distribute them. How that computer (typically a server) is set up to do that is covered more in LAMP Environments but this article will explain the idea of the file structure and how it relates to what you view on your domain.

When you signed up for your domain, a web hosting account was created. Although you typically will interact mostly with the web interface to create subdomains, install applications, and other common tasks, you might occasionally also need to work directly with the files in your account. The File Manager in your cPanel is one way to see these files. You can also create an FTP account in cPanel and use an FTP program to interact with these files (FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol, and it’s a way of using a desktop client to transfer files to and from your web server space).

Let’s take a look at the File Manager built into your cPanel to get a better understanding of the file structure that makes up your website(s).

1. Log in to cPanel with your  Brown username and password.
   
2. On the homepage of your control panel, you’ll have all the various tools listed. You can easily find the File Manager by using the search tool in the upper righthand corner and typing File Manager. You can also find its icon under Files.
3. You are now sent to the File Manager and can navigate the folder structure there.

You’ll notice when the File Manager opens up that this looks very much like a folder on your computer. There are a few folders in it as well as files, and you can navigate down into those folders and see what’s inside of them. At the top level of the File Manager, you also have the option of interacting with files and folders you select by moving them around or removing them. There is a larger article all about how to use the file manager at Accessing Your Files through the File Manager so we won’t talk much about how the interface works here. Instead, we’ll cover what those folders and files actually mean and how they relate to what someone sees when they visit your website.

By default, you have a variety of folders at the root of your web space (the first screen you see when you open up the file manager). Some of them are created automatically to store information about the panel and setup of certain sites. These folders are things like access-logs, etc, ssl, and tmp. You can safely ignore most of those folders because they don’t correspond to actual websites. Let’s look at which folders do and how it all works.

Your main domain will correspond with a folder called public_html. Whatever files and folders are inside of this folder are available on that main domain. If you installed WordPress here you’ll likely see a lot of WordPress-related files within it (which were probably helpfully put there by the automated installer). Let’s say we uploaded an image called mypicture.jpg directly into the public_html folder. That image would now be available at yourdomain.com/mypicture.jpg. The slash after your domain implies “this file is inside this folder”. But what if we had a folder inside the public_html folder? How does that appear? This is typically called a subfolder so let’s put a folder in public_html called “images” and put our image, mypicture.jpg, inside of that folder. What would you type in a browser to get to that file now? The location would be mydomain.com/images/mypicture.jpg. So subfolders are also indicated by a forward slash after a domain.

What about subdomains? You can have completely separate sites called subdomains that appear as nameofsubdomain.yourdomain.digitalscholarship.brown.edu. But where are they in the file structure? When you create a subdomain, cPanel will ask you to give the subdomain directory a name. If I had a subdomain called photos.mydomain.com for example, I might want to name the folder “photos” (by default your control panel will call the folder by the name of the subdomain). Folders for subdomains are located inside the public_html folder. So when you go to the File Manager and navigate to public_html, you’ll see folders listed for all of your subdomains and once you navigate inside one of those folders, you’ll see files and folders specifically for that subdomain that appear on the web at that subdomain’s address.

File Manager in cPanel is great to view these files and folders, but it can be limiting if you want to upload an entire folder of information to your website. If you find yourself wanting to do more with the files and folders on your web space you may want to consider using File Transfer Protocol (FTP). FTP will allow you to upload and download files to and from your File Manager (i.e. your website) in bulk. For information on using FTP, click here.

This article applies only if you own your own top-level domain. If you have been using the free subdomain option with digitalscholarship.brown.edu through Brown University, this does not apply to you.

Similarly, if you’re migrating your content to Reclaim Hosting, this article does not apply to you.

Transferring a domain you already own is not too much different from registering a new domain, except the transfer process requires an EPP code, or an agreement code between your old registrar and your new registrar that allows the release of your domain. Your new registrar will have information on how to transfer in a domain. When you start that process, you will be prompted to enter your EPP code.

How to find your EPP Code:

1. To get started, log in to your control panel (https://digitalscholarship.brown.edu/dashboard) using your Digital Scholarship at Brown username and password.
   
2. Once you’re logged in, you’ll see the cPanel interface.  Now click on the Manage Your Account menu at the top of your screen and select Migration Information.
   

3. Click the Lock button to unlock your Brown University account.

4. Click Get Code. Once that’s done, the system will send you an email with your EPP code.

At this stage, here are a few items to note:

• You’ll receive a series of emails from both your old and new registrars asking you to authorize the transfer. Please act on every email you receive in a timely fashion– even if the emails look like duplicates.
• If you do not authorize the transfer in a timely fashion, the domain transfer will expire and you will need to start over.
• The domain must be older than 60 days.
• The domain must have no other transfers in the last 60 days.
• The domain transfer process can take up to a week, depending on how fast your registrars work.
• Once the domain transfer completes, you’ll receive a notification.

Your Digital Scholarship at Brown cPanel includes a File Manager that allows you to interact directly with the files stored in your web hosting account. This can be useful if you want to upload software that cannot be automatically installed via the Web Applications section of your cPanel, if you need to change the name or permissions of a file or group or files, or if you want to edit a plain text file. To access your files via the File Manager, use these steps:

1. Log in to digitalscholarship.brown.edu with your Brown username and password.
   
2. Once logged in, you’ll be on the homepage of your cPanel. The easiest way to navigate your cPanel is by utilizing the search bar in the top right panel. Search File Manager. When you press enter, you will be automatically redirected to the File Manager.  You can also find the File Manager icon under the Files section.
   
3. On the left side of the “File Manager” window, you’ll see a navigation menu containing the file structure of your web hosting account. More information about the contents of these files and folders can be found in the File Structures and the File Manager documentation article.
   
4. In the navigation menu, choose the public_html directory. This will take you directly to the folder that contains the files associated with your website(s). You’ll notice your current location (the public_html folder) is bolded and highlighted in this menu. Click the [+] (expand) icon next to a folder to see what subfolders it contains, or click on the name of the folder to view all of its contents in the file browser on the right side of the page. You can also navigate through the folders in your account by double-clicking on them in the menu on the left side of your file manager.
   
5. To select an item, click once on its icon in the file browser. You can also use the “Select All” button above the file browser, or your computer’s keyboard shortcuts (Shift, Command, Control, etc), to select multiple items from this list.
   
6. Depending on what you have selected, different options will be available to you in the action menu across the top of your file manager. For example, if you have selected a folder, you can rename it or Change Permissions on it.
   
7. If you know exactly what location you want to skip to within your web hosting account, you can type it into the box directly above the navigation menu and click Go.
8. Alternatively, if you know the exact name of the file or folder you are looking for, but not its location, you can use the Search box to find it.