Need Help to Recover WordPress Site Hijacked by GoDaddy – Can't find Backup!
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Due to the failure of an auto-renewal consolidation with GoDaddy, my hosting account expiration remained different from my domain renewal. The domain renewal is 12/31/2016 (oddly, this date got moved to a nice round year end date), but the hosting renewal was set for 10/5/2016. I have multiple domains, but the PRIMARY one related to my business is the one I’m posting about. For all domains, though, I have had auto-renew set up. Unfortunately, my bank issued me new cards for both my personal and business check cards (my primary and backup billing methods), so the attempt to renew some items failed. Despite getting MULTIPLE emails from GoDaddy about updating the auto-renew billing methods, the only ones I saw were about other domains the registrations for which were going to expire at a later date. Due to cash flow constraints, at my business, I was not sure which ones I’d be able to afford to renew, so I delayed updating the billing until today. Keep in mind that out of the 15 emails I received, all were related to auto-renew for DOMAIN REGISTRATION, and only ONE was about billing for hosting. The SECOND email was to inform me that the site had been cancelled and would be deleted. I’d actually seen a handful of their emails, all of which looked the same, so I’d assumed they were all the same. Silly me. I know this only now, after speaking with GoDaddy who are ‘offering’ to ‘restore’ my site for $150 (in addition to the hosting renewal), and them telling me that they tried contacting me. I protested that there were no calls, explained that the renewal for the primary domain registration and hosting should be both on 12/31/2016, etc, and during the conversation looked every email, which is when I discovered the SINGLE gem of a notice saying that my hosting billing had a problem.
Anyway… I believe I’ve backed up my site before using WordPress, but I don’t know how to find it. Also, though GoDaddy seems to have ‘parked’ my site, I can still log in and see much of the features of my site and the admin functions using WordPress. This is how I’m posting to the forum now. It is only when I go to ‘pages’ that I get a page that looks like it’s trying to refresh without success. And when I go to ‘settings’ I get redirected to the GoDaddy ‘parking’ page.
Is it possible that my backups were saved in the very database that was being hosted by GoDaddy? If they were downloaded to my local disk, what is the default path where such downloads are normally saved? Is there a backdoor to find the pages so that I can restore them? Given that GoDaddy has somehow half-controlled my site now (obviously I can access it, but I can’t control all the features it seems), is there a way to export the data, so that I can re-import it again once I pay for hosting?
Failing all that, and assuming there is no backup somewhere that I can access on my own, is there any magic/secret process to dealing with GoDaddy – perhaps a policy that I can reference, or exemption that may apply – so that I would not have to pay the $150 ransom to get my website back?
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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