Taking over the IT department when the previous IT regime had zero plans on how to integrate the series of businesses they had taken over in the past several years makes for some fun times. I have 4 different godaddy accounts, a couple DH accounts, and even one from a German company I had never heard of. And I had to fight, beg, talk, email, reverse engineer, and guess on several logins. Something something “no documentation”.

That being said, I’ve also had the responsibility of migrating and managing some of our wordpress sites and was SOL when it came to logins. Luckily GD, DH, and even the German cpanel host company all allowed for some sort of mysql access – whether that was shell access or phpmyadmin – so I could “easily” reset the credentials.

On Dreamhost using SSH:
mysql -h MYSQL.DOMAINNAME.TLD -u MYDBUSERPASSWORDFROMTHEPANEL -p
Enter your DB User password
show databases;
use DATABASENAMEHERE;
show tables;
Look for one with “users” at the end (eg wp_users)
List the Users Table along with the ID you’ll need later (First Column)
select id, user_login, user_pass from NAMEOFUSERTABLE;
update NAMEOFUSERTABLE set user_pass = MD5('YOURNEWPASSWORDHERE') where ID = NUMBERFOUNDABOVE

Through PHPMYADMIN
Open PHPMyAdmin and click on the WP database
Find the “Users” table (eg wp_users)
Click on Browse
Click on edit by the user for which you desire to change the password
Where it says “user_pass” change the function drop down to MD5 and then type in a plain text password.
Hit save/submit