Lost site

  • juhowitt · Member ·

    We forgot to renew our demain name I February and it was sold on in April. We have always used WordPress. Is it possible to just rename our .com site from Howittgites.com to Howittgites.eu? My wife who in the past has created the site told me the information is on WordPress.com not our pc. Our friend who was hosting and running it has 🏃‍♂️. Any help greatfully received. In idiot terms if possible. Nichthewood

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    Hi there,

    You can use any domain you want for your site, yes.

    I see at the moment you have two domains connected to your site with us: howittgites.eu and howittgites.fr. The .fr version of the domain is also pointed to us, and is currently set as primary, i.e. when someone visits your site, that’s the domain they’ll see.

    If you prefer, you can make the .eu version primary instead, but before you do that, you’ll need to point the domain to us. To do that, you’ll need to log in at GoDaddy where the domain is registered, and update the name servers to the following:

    NS1.WORDPRESS.COM

    NS2.WORDPRESS.COM

    NS3.WORDPRESS.COM

    GoDaddy support will also be able to do that for you, if you provide them with this info.

    That will complete the process to point the domain to your WordPress.com site. Then you can go to Upgrades ->Domains in the dashboard, and click the button there to set the domain to primary. Once the .eu domain is primary, that will be the one visitors see in their browsers, but both the .eu and the .fr domain will take people to your site.

    Let me know if any of this is unclear :)

  • nichthewood · Member ·

    Hi and thanks. I have changed the servers now. We had a site howittgites.com until April when we forgot to renew it. It was built on WordPress. Is there any way we can retrieve the data and use it on the .eu site or even rename the .com to .eu. I’m sorry I don’t understand these things. Any help greatfully received. Nich and Julie Howitt

  • staff-heroponriki · Staff ·

    We had a site howittgites.com until April when we forgot to renew it. It was built on WordPress. Is there any way we can retrieve the data and use it on the .eu site or even rename the .com to .eu.

    It doesn’t appear that howittgites.com was hosted here at WordPress.com, so it sounds like it was using the open-source WordPress software (from WordPress.org) but hosted elsewhere.

    Because WordPress.com and WordPress.org are two entirely separate entities, we cannot access files or data for sites that are hosted elsewhere, so WordPress.com staff can only assist with sites that are hosted on our servers and we wouldn’t have any way to access or restore any data from that website.

    You can find more information here about the differences between WordPress.org software and WordPress.com: https://wordpress.com/support/com-vs-org/

    Since that domain appears to have been purchased by another party, we don’t have any way to tell where the site was hosted prior. If you can remember where it was hosted before (like GoDaddy, Siteground, Bluehost, HostGator, etc.) you could reach out to them and hopefully they’ll have a backup of that site so you can get an XML export and use that to import it into your existing WordPress.com site or a new WordPress.com site.

    I hope that clarifies things!

  • nichthewood · Member ·

    Thanks for the reply. It was hosted by a friend and he used Host gator,if I recall correctly. Does this help.

  • staff-heroponriki · Staff ·

    Thanks for the update, but that doesn’t change anything – we still wouldn’t have any access or ability to do anything here.

    If your friend was hosting the site at HostGator, he may still have an account there with the hosting plan that hosted your site. Your site might be still there on their servers, so have them reach out to HostGator to see if they can get your site accessible using a temporary domain. Then, if you can still log in via that temporary domain, you can create an export file that you can use to import to another WordPress.com site. If the site is not public, an import may not work.

    I hope that helps.

  • nichthewood · Member ·

    Thanks for you help. I have contacted the hoster, but don’t hold out much hope. Think we will be starting from scratch

  • deancroyal · Staff ·

    If you don’t have any luck with the previous host, there might be a very manual option available.

    There’s a website called Wayback Machine. It archives pages of publicly available websites. Here is your URL’s archive on their site: https://web.archive.org/web/20210801000000*/howittgites.com

    Look for colored bubbles on the calendars below. Place your cursor over the top of them then click on the date. That will pull up a version of your website on that day.

    If you find a version that matches, you can copy the text and other elements of the pages and paste them into new posts and pages on a new site. Again, as I said, this is very manual. But, it’s an option. :)

  • nichthewood · Member ·

    That is brilliant. Thank you so much. All the details are there so I’ve just got to work out how the get them copied across to wordpress.
    Many thanks again for your time and trouble 👍Nich Howitt

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