and its back up. I Installed 8.1 now i have root access. and then set everything to 8.1 and restarted the services.
Thank you so so much to everyone that helped and thanks @Jim M for the guidance on moving!
Thanks for the info Jim. I am glad to say I have resolved the issue I was having. I updated the software on the server panel which updated php modules etc. This essentially repaired and updated everything that was missing and this fixed the php issue. Then the upgrade completed successfully!
Now the site it up I an pulling partial backups from cpanel so i have some kind of backups and i have set up an ftp server so going to pull a full backup and put it on my ftp server. Hopefully then I will have a full backup and can move everything over to new server.
