Reactivating expired hosting account

Was this shared hosting or a VPS, if it is shared hosting and the hosting provider keeps copies for up to a few months, you might be in luck. But it's the end user responsibility to have backups of their content of course. It's very hard to get this back now unless the provider happens to still have access (and is interested in restoring) to older backups. Usually when they prune an account it's GOOD practice to not retain customer data and archives of it, for various reasons.