Old website not working

How you doing @asimafzal,

Thanks for the details. Just to make sure I understand your situation correctly: the domain name expired 3 years ago, but the website files are supposed to still exist on a separate/other hosting account that you still have access to and now, when you log into that hosting, you can’t find the same WordPress files there. Is that correct?

If so, here are the steps to check before assuming the data is lost:

1. Confirm you’re looking in the right hosting account. If the site was hosted separately from where the domain was registered, log into the cPanel (or hosting control panel) for that specific hosting account not the domain registrar and check the File Manager under public_html or any subfolder/addon domain folder that might match the old domain name. Sites are sometimes stored in a subfolder named after the domain (e.g. public_html/olddomain.com/) rather than the main public_html.
2. Check if it was an addon or subdomain setup. If the old domain was added as an “Addon Domain” on a hosting account that primarily serves a different main domain, its files typically live in a separate folder that’s easy to overlook. Look in cPanel -> Domains -> Addon Domains (or equivalent) to see if there’s a record of it, even if the domain itself no longer resolves.
3. Check with your hosting provider directly. Ask them specifically: “Do you have any backups or files under [olddomain.com] from around 3 years ago, even in an inactive or archived account?” Many hosts keep backups longer than you’d expect, especially “catastrophic” backups, and it’s worth asking even if their standard retention policy says otherwise.
4. Look for a separate database. WordPress files (wp-content, themes, plugins) are only half of a website you also need the MySQL database. Check phpMyAdmin on that hosting account for any database matching the old site, since without it the files alone won’t restore a working site.
5. If nothing turns up on that hosting account, check the Wayback Machine (https://web.archive.org) by entering the old domain name. It can’t recover the actual WordPress files or database, but it can let you manually recover text content and some images from old snapshots to help rebuild the site.

What I’d need to know to help further:

• Do you (or the client) still have login/cPanel access to that “other hosting,” or is access also lost?
• Was this a shared hosting account, or was the site possibly hosted under a reseller/addon domain setup?
• Do you have a database export (.sql file) anywhere, separate from the file backups?

Reference: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/domain-name-expired-need-to-recover-website/ has a similar case with a step-by-step breakdown of what’s needed (hosting access + database + wp-content folder) to restore a site like this.

Let me know how it goes and if these instructions helped! See ya!