Long story short: the old website/blog used during my PhD research is now finally back online and credit for this goes to Drupal community support!
It will not be updated, but at least the content is accessible (although expect to find some broken links, here and there). See this page, here.
Longer story is quite simple.
For several reasons, I adopted WordPress for the main website installed on mydomain and I had planned to restore the old PhD website into a subdomain.
I knew I had all the backups I’d need, but I did not come to terms with the implications of having to different sites on the same host and, more importantly, with the fact that the latest version, running on my old website, it is now unmaintained and ‘out of production’.
My lack of sound understanding of CMS, together with the fear of testing too much on live environments (which I know I shouldn’t do), and more importantly, the lack of time put me a bit in despair at a certain point. However, after having managed to find the proper documentation and understood a little better where the problem could lie, I turned to the Drupal community forum for support. In less than a week, the old website is finally up.
Here, the Support request thread. Thanks Jenna