Taking an expired/archived website and reproducing it to its repurchased domain

  • Unusual situation.

    I begun a .weebly.com website years back for an upcoming sponsored travel thing and was offered to have my website remade/imporved for no cost, by an upcoming web developer associate of one of my sponsors, to add to his portfolio. Cool, i thought, the website theme was made for wordpress, and he purchased the domain for me via hostgator (which i later found out), giving me the admin control for changes, content upload etc etc. The website domain was (thumbsupafrica.net) and the login url was (thumbsupafrica.net/wp-admin).

    Website worked a charm and the creator tooks my thanks and disappeared. A year later domain renewal came up (my website wasn’t there anymore, i tracked where the domain was purchased and called up hostgator) and being in his name (Pau Linares) i couldn’t transfer the domain to myself and just settled with paying the renewal and leaving it in his name.

    Whatever i thought, websites still up, who cares. Couldn’t get a hold of him either, (only had his email which he wasn’t responding to),so let the world keep spinning.

    One year later and i was too late. The domain expired, (as i wasn’t being sent the pending expiry notice), and i was like, shit. But the domain was now available. I bought thumbsupafrica.net via host gator and tried to log into my (thumbsupafrica.net/wp-admin) dashboard page and no surprise, GONE.

    SO i now realise I’m an idiot, who should have backed up his content earlier but with this realisation i still have this problem. How do i get the website, as it was a year ago, i.e. (https://wayback.archive.org/web/20140109221124/https://thumbsupafrica.net/) to to exist under the domain (thumbsupafrica.net) now that i have ownership of the domain.

    Ps
    (I have already accepted the probability of answers like “can’t do it, ya sites stuffed. lol. ya moran” and the such, however, comment like such as you may, but if anyone can help with some sort of easy fix that i am missing, i would be so stoked to hear about it.)

    Thanks in advance, Mozzie

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  • Did you originally have access to the HostGator cPanel, where you could have downloaded the site files as well as exported the database?

    Did your original “admin control” (WP Dashboard) allow you to install plugins? That is, did you have Administrator privileges? If you did, and didn’t install an use a “backup” plugin of some nature, then your observations are correct: the site, as it was, is gone.

    So you now have the domain with HG. Do you also have the hosting account? Then install WP and use the link you provided to copy and paste to rebuild the site.

    Of course (in case you haven’t tried it yet), you could always contact HostGator and explain the situation. Who knows they may have a backup available.

    It’s a long shot, but worth a try.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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