Lost Website

  • Unknown's avatar
    slehelennineill · Member ·

    Hello! I had a website, which I didn’t renew the domain for in 2020, sheilahoneill.com. I can see it under my wordpress blogs, but I can’t click on it and see any of the content. Is it lost forever? Is there a way to recover my work??

    Please help,

    Thank you!

    Sheila

    I don’t have a site linked to this WordPress.com account

  • Unknown's avatar
    cuellin · Member ·

    Hi there!

    Can you remember the hosting service you were using? It would seem that you weren’t using WordPress.com for your hosting and instead you were using the open-source version of WordPress from WordPress.org which is quite different.
    You can learn about the differences here: https://wordpress.com/com-vs-org/

    Right now your domain sheilahoneill.com is available for purchase for anyone. But the website itself, with all the content, would be saved by the hosting provider, and if you stopped paying for the hosting service too it is very possible that the website is lost forever (unless you have a backup copy saved).

    If you would have been using WordPress.com for hosting, you would be able to still have access to your website through the free .wordpress.com subdomain that everyone gets when you create a new website, even after letting your custom domain expire.

    The reason you can still see your old domain under your WordPress blogs is that you can connect your sites that use WordPress on other providers to your WordPress.com account using Jetpack, so you can access your site from here. That being said, once the site has disappeared, you need to delete the connection manually from your account, otherwise, you’ll still see it listed but it just won’t work.

    Hopefully, this sheds some light on your case. The best option may be to start over from scratch.
    If you have any other questions, we are here to help 😉
    Good luck!

  • staff-blorbo · Staff ·

    I’m sorry, but your site was not hosted with WordPress.com. It was a site 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. You can find more information here about the differences between WordPress.org software and WordPress.com: https://wordpress.com/support/com-vs-org/

    The site was also not using our backup product https://jetpack.com/upgrade/backup/ so we are unable to directly assist with this.

    Your best option is to contact your former hosting provider to ask if they still have a backup of your account with them.

    If not, you’re welcome to start a new site with us at https://wordpress.com/start where you’ll at least be able to copy and paste from an archived copy, like https://web.archive.org/web/20190929083217/https://www.sheilahoneill.com/

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