Website Rob

The organization I am working with do not have any credentials for any type of FTP or hosting service.

Then the organization needs to obtain those credentials. If they are the Owner of the Hosting account they have every right to have full access to said account; such as the Hosting Control Panel and FTP. If they are not the Owner they need to contact the Owner and get access information from them. Or have the Owner make changes you cannot.

And yes, there is a way to prevent ability for Plugin and Theme changes. That is done through the ‘public_html/wp-config.php’ file which can easily be accessed through either access method mentioned above. Although there are plugins that can give access to ‘wp-config.php’ file, in this case account access is more important.

Connection lost or the server is busy. Please try again later.

The above usually indicates the database server is overloaded, cannot accepted new connections. Which is why says to try later. This can cause things to go wrong within WordPress. And we don’t know how your database was affected nor what the Hoster did to resolve the problem.

If you continue to receive Connection error or timeout msgs. you should contact your Hoster about it and/or consider moving to another Hoster.

Without seeing an example or any error log output to go by, you’ll have to depend on your Hosting Support for help. Ask them to look at the error logs or show them an example they can test.

Even simpler method is to either ask your new Hoster to transfer the account for you or do a cPanel full site backup and upload that backup file to new Hosting account, your new Hoster can restore it for you. Either of these methods makes sure all eMails, error logs, and any/every thing else is transferred over.

After setup on new Hosting account, use the Nameservers provided to you by new Hoster to update at your Registrar – and you’re done. You might have to reset Permalinks and that only requires using Admin -> Settings -> Permalinks – Click “Save” button, you don’t have to make any changes.

Talk to your new Hoster if not sure.

More helpful information:
https://wordpress.org/support/article/moving-wordpress/#moving-to-a-new-server

Have you searched https://wordpress.org/plugins/ for a Membership plugin? Seems it might be faster to check out a few rather than try and create one from scratch.

Although I’m still not sure exactly what problem you’re having, no example to go by, did the cache code I provided help at all?

I would think that having a page listing all the PDF’s, including revisions, would be the simplest method. Linking to that page would mean only one page needs updating.