so it was ages since the last time I administered one of my sites.. and of course i couldn’t find passwords, etc.

i was using joomla as the CMS.. had to even find out that ‘admin’ was the default administrator user

found good tips for setting the password through a backdoor at:
http://www.dart-creations.com/joomla/joomla-tips-and-tricks/25-forgot-your-super-administrator-password.html

for that even though, i had to find the database name / username and password for that.
with go daddy being the host, they have a mySQL tool, and then from the list of databases, i could choose ‘details’, and within that, it gave me the username, and a place to reset the password.

after doing that, i got into the database, and altered the admin password for joomla.

the login worked, but then an error from joomla trying to access the database.
turns out it needs the right database password stored in the configuration.php file on the root of the website.

So i looked at that using go daddy’s file manager, and sure enough in there i found the spot, and could see what the old password was for the database.
i updated that file to the new password..

gave the site a while to refresh it’s cache.. and then everything worked..

i’ll likely need all the above again.