Our Design/Hosting Company has/is about to go under - now what?

Warning, mostly non technical guy needs help!!!!

OK, here’s a problem that I hope is unusual. A small real estate company I work with bought a website from a company that will remain nameless several months ago. Lots of work went into getting all our content built in Modx, none of which went live due to an illness within the ownership of the company (all is fine now).

So, a great deal of content is now in Modx that has yet to be published to our URL, which still has the old website on it.

About 6 months ago, the design/hosting company we’re working with began returning our calls very intermittently and they completely stopped answering calls/e-mails about 2 months ago. Their URL is scheduled to expire in Nov 2009. I can only assume that they’re out of business, and their domain is just coasting along to expiration.

Right now our Modx Content resides on their server in this domain structure:

http://ourcompanyname.hostcompanyname.com/manager

...and I need to figure out what to do to keep disaster from striking after their domain expires.

What can I do to "save" all of the work we’ve put into site? Do I simply publish from the URL above to the real estate company’s domain, install Modx on the domain/server, point the new ModX install to our site and voila, everything from the old host is now there for the owners to manipulate? I have a feeling its not that easy, but I hope there’s ~some~ way to keep all the content from evaporating and from us to have to start over from scratch.

Any advice/guidance that any of you can provide - even if its as simple as pointing me to the correct place within the online documentation to take care of this problem, would be very gratefully accepted. Can anyone recommend a hosting/design company that uses Modx that would charge $50-$100 or so monthly that could just take care of this for them?

Thanks,

Matt

contact [email protected] I can probably help you.
Sanjaya Yogi

Unfortunately, most of the content of your web site is actually in the MODx MySQL database at their host. Your first move should be to try to get data from them. You need all the files in the MODx install and the contents of the MySQL database at the site (the latter being much more important).

What you’d like, ideally, is that they dump the MODx database to an .SQL file for you. That .SQL file will be very valuable since it will contain all document content, the templates, and any snippets, chunks, and plugins used at the site. It would take them less than 10 minutes to do. If they’re willing to give you the login credentials for the local cPanel it would be simple to pull that out yourself.

Second, they could put all the files at the site in a .zip file for you -- maybe 20 minutes more if they know what they’re doing, also doable with the cPanel login (or FTP access to the site, which they might be willing to set up).

It would also be helpful to know exactly which version of MODx they are using.

It’s probably worth offering them a little cash for the above (to be paid after your new site is up with the data).

If you can’t get them to help you out, you’d have to actually cut and paste the template and content from page source at the live web site into a new MODx site and download any CSS files and images from the live site. Then you’d have to recreate any snippets and chunks used on the site. That won’t be much fun.

Good luck. Hope this helps.

Hi Matt,

are you able to login on that site?

if that’s the case, this thread might be helpful: http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php?topic=39501.0

j