I think I might've got it. I'm reading about it and it just clicked.
After buying the website through Flippa and getting the domain transferred over to the account, the seller was helping me set up the server. It's a WordPress site. All she helped me do was create a droplet, didn't even choose wordpress as an image, and she gave me an SSH key. Under DNS, we never added the domain and neither did we change the namesevers given by my DigitalOcean to be updated on GoDaddy. But the server was just running. So essentially all I had was a droplet named with an SSH key and nothing on the server. That's why when I go into my FTP program and go to see the files I can't see anything but empty basic folders. Nothing with domains and themes. It doesn't make sense for my site to run without the WordPress image option (apache2 etc) for 4 days. Is it possible that the server/snapshot was all along on her account and running there? She said she still has her account.