It’s easier to prevent than to heal, and that’s why we need to mention – even now – that it’s imperative to have a backup with all the data in your web hosting account.
It is said that there are two categories of people: those who back up their data and the ones that will need a backup of it.
However, if you are in the unfortunate situation of completely losing the data from your hosting account and you don’t have a backup, we have some tips on what you can do to solve the problem (at least partially).
1. If you want to move the domain without your web hosting providers’ help
Let’s say you have an older website backup, or you want to publish a temporary homepage to announce your customers that your website is down for the moment and will be back soon.
Web hosting companies typically purchase domains from a larger vendor that is a partner of Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a nonprofit organization that manages global domains.
To see which domain vendor has registered your domain name, you can check your WHOIS domain data. Use an online WHOIS service such as https://www.whois.com/whois. Enter your domain name (without www), and you will get the result.
Identify the line starting with “Registrar:” and you will find the hosting provider. Now you can search in Google ” ‘your domain name’ customer login,” and in the first links, you will find the page “Logging into the Control Panel” for your domain. In this article, you must identify the “customer login” link, not the “reseller login” link. For your website, it will be something along the line of manage your customer account. Try to reset your password using the email address used when the domain was registered which can be found in the WHOIS information.
If you receive a message or email saying that your email address is not registered, then try to make a new account with that vendor.
Once you have this new account, the domain will most likely not be associated with your account. Contact that vendor and ask him to make this association by proving that you own the domain. Then you can change your nameservers or obtain the AUTH code to transfer this domain to another web hosting company.
If you need help, you can ask the new web hosting provider.
2. If it is urgent for you to receive and send emails
Without a backup or access to your old hosting account, you can not transfer the old messages from your email addresses. However, you can create these email addresses from scratch, and so you can send and receive email messages.
The first step is to have access to the domain administrator account, for that see paragraph 1 above.
Then you can order a web hosting service from a new vendor, and after creating your hosting account, you can add the email address through cPanel. With the new provider, the email address will work again within a few hours.
3. If you want to recover the content of the website
If you have a blog, a presentation website or an online store, you have probably already invested years of work in the content. A full and original recovery can only be done with a backup or having access to your web hosting account. Otherwise, you can use the “Internet archives.” You will have a lot of work and many copy/paste operations to do, but it’s a better way than to lose all the content. You have two options available:
Archive.org
Archive.org is a nonprofit organization that builds the digital library of the internet, and fortunately for you has saved (almost) all websites from all time. You have high chances to find copies of your website pages. The advantage of archive.org to Google cache is that archive.org also saves the images.
Google cache
To access Google’s cache (or copies), you must search in Google for “cache:” followed by the full address of one of the pages of your website. Hopefully, you will get the most recent copy of the page.
From archive.org and Google cache you can copy the content of your website. You still need to install the platform you used for your website (such as WordPress, Drupal, Magento) from scratch to create new pages and then copy the content.