Moved an old wordpress site to another folder on the server, but it is still redirecting even though there is no .htaccess file

Question

My friends site got some malware or something, so he decided to stop using wordpress and have me build his website from scratch. I have never used wordpress in my life, but I FTP'd into the root directory on the server, created a new folder called "old_wordpress_site", and moved every single file to that folder. I made a file in the root directory called index.html and I went to the URL, but it still seems to be affected by wordpress. I go to www.example.com and it says:

Not Found

The requested URL /newink/ was not found on this server.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

There doesn't seem to be an .htaccess file (which is strange because I thought an .htaccess file was the only way it could redirect automatically, but anyway...), but I went to this question here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18406156/redirect-all-to-index-php-htaccess, copied and pasted the answer, and added an .htaccess file to the root directory. It didn't work. Now I'm seeing:

Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator and inform them of the time the error occurred, and the actions you performed just before this error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

How can I simply get rid of this wordpress junk and add an index.php file like I usually do?

Answer 1

Is this on a hosted account, perhaps with cPanel or the like?

With cPanel, the site may have been set up on an "addon" domain, where it's pointed at the server level to a directory rather than to the main website directory. I'm not sure if the naming is similar for other hosting control panels, but they're likely to have the same functionality of "addon" domains in subfolders and "parked" domains which point to the main hosting account's public_html directory.

The error about not finding /newink/ makes me think that the server-level Apache config is set for vhosting an addon domain and is looking for ~username/public_html/newink/ while you're trying to work in ~username/public_html. If this is the case, either work in that directory or get into the web hosting control panel and change it from "addon" to "parked"