My friend bartered with someone to provide her dancing lessons in return for a website. She had that website for several years and it’s been successful and now it has a database included in it as well. All of her clients are saved on that website, on the database.
She’s refusing to give her admin access by giving her the username and password. Nothing sketchy happened, she’s just insane. So my friend is looking for a way to obtain the database information and as much as she can from the website in a way of duplicating it and get a different domain name and rebuild it.
Is there any way to access the database and her website? Is there any way to duplicate it?
Edit:
She says she has access to the Dashboard but it is limited. She can’t add plugins and doesn’t have access to the appearance options and many other things. Sounds like she has basic access, I forget what it’s called (maybe an editor or something)
Still, maybe with that login info he could login with an FTP Client and get the Database info? Even all the files and rebuild the website.
Another method she mentioned was building a new website but she just wants access to the whole OLD website which is hijacked right now by the person who built it. She’s worried she may delete it.
My friend also has access to the domain registrar. She bought the domain herself.
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What about hosting? If your friend pays another company to host the site then she can remove the developer’s access and access the database through the hosting panel. Hopefully the developer who is holding it hostage doesn’t also host it…
I hate to say this, but your “friend” doesn’t own the code nor the database to the website. It was a bad deal indeed – especially, if no physical contract in regards to the terms of service, ownership and transfership of code and related database, exists. The code is owned by the creator of the site. And your “friend” is not the creator of said code.
What you’re basically asking here is how to hack into the full-privilege admin area or illegally access the site FTP. Good luck with that.
It really comes down to who pays for / has control of the hosting. If that is your friend – she is in luck. If not, she is fucked.
She registered the domain, that’s a huge win. Because she can change and point it where she chooses to.
Do you have access to the hosting panel? (Not the WP admin) If you do, you could have access to the database and change the admin account data and login with that new credentials, install a backup/export plugin and get a backup/bundle file so you could plug into a new site and import.
The other way is to access the file manager / FTP and get the files for the WP install (mainly the wp-content), and the database from the PHPMyAdmin or the database manager and export the whole table. This may be easier to get, but a bit trickier to restore.
(Sidenote: If the host is provided by this person, you should take the data and run from there! If you are paying for the host, contact support and get the access of this person revoked and for them to give you admin rights)
If you don’t have access to that, it may be a bit more complex.
The customers data, is in a CRM plugin or something like that? Most of those have the option to generate reports/export the data.
Same with the pages and website content, if she has editor permissions, she could copy the whole pages from the page builder and paste them in a new/local install.
Hope you can get the site back, or at least the data!
If the data is stored in an a database in a hosting account that your friend doesn’t own, but they still have access to view the client information through the site, then her best bet might be to have a savvy person help her to scrape the client info using a tool like HTTrack.
HTTrack would allow you to automate crawling the back end of the site (just as a human would do manually) and saving static copies of the client information.
It wouldn’t be in a format that would be all that useful for porting into a new site, but it could be a valuable backup in case the worst is to happen and your friend loses access to the site and data.
Who’s hosting the website? You can always do a cpanel backup and move the thing away to a new server, thus you own every aspect.
Perhaps go one by one in the site map and do full page screenshots. Then hire someone else to rebuild using those pages as the premise?
If you are still able to log in to the site, depending on privileges, there are plugins that will allow the whole site to be backed up to a .zip file. Failing this, try approaching the hosting company to see if they can back it up and/or grant access. This will more than likely depend on if your friend is the one paying the hosting fees though.
Option 1. WordPress has many security issues. For every version of WordPress there is some hole. There are more holes in plugins. If the administrator is just slightly lazy and does not update everything every time, you can find a person proficient in PHP. They can detect versions of Worpdress and plugins, find in a catalogue of security issues the right ones, hack it, copy all code and all database. Because the web is yours, this would not be illegal. You can hack a web that you essentialy own.
Option 2. Use whatever politics/deal to get the name and password from the admin. For example, pay them money “for all the work done” and write a short contract at that point that states that the web with all the code+database is yours or something (you give them money only if they sign it). If they sign, you could show it to hosting and demand access to your own web.
Option 3. If you own the domain and have access, simply copy what you can from the web (HTML, texts, whatever), build a new website and redirect the domain to the new website. Do not use new domain! The old domain is probably indexed in Google, people already know it and it would be not smart stop using it.
Does she own the domain? Worst case scenario is that you could clone the HTML and build a new theme and point the domain to a new server.