Chmod permission automatic change or ghosts in the machine

  • Apologizes if this has been asked before, I did try searching but did not find the exact problem I’m having.

    Our issue is the hosting company we have for our websites tell us that it is WordPress itself that is causing all these issues by changing the chmod permissions by itself whenever we make a post or update a page to our WordPress site.

    And if we were to do the updates too close together it causes the website to hang there for up to 10 minutes before returning a 500 Internal Server error. Then the WordPress sites are down for a few hours, then apparently, without any involvement from the hosting company the WordPress websites magically reappears a few hours later.

    Note: This “work” is done to only one WordPress site at a time. Except the work ( posting and updating only ) on the one WordPress site effects the majority of our other WordPress sites once the one site hangs.

    The first time this happened, our websites were down for 3 days, as only php files were effected because our HTML websites were still online.

    I cannot post the link(s) to my website on here, as they have adult humor. I believe it is the adult humor that the hosting company, that once they were fine with has been relegated to the backroom ( aka a dying server ). Or a heavily restricted server.

    Originally the hosting company blamed the use of too many server resources on a website, then mentioned it was our one website, which we have no association with, it just is hosted on the same server.

    What I have done is:
    Changed the permissions. Nothing.

    Changed the .htaccess to .htaccess_deactivated via FTP. Nothing.

    Temporarily change the memory limit via FTP. Nothing.

    Deactivated all the plugins via FTP. Nothing.

    Have not installed a fresh copy of wp-content and wp-admin yet. They swear those folders are fine.

    Asked for the server logs, still waiting…

    The hosting company keeps blaming WordPress, however we’re suspecting something entirely different..

    We’re looking ( to get things stable enough ) at creating more up-to-date backups to possibly move our sites soon.

    We just wanted to know if any one else has gone through all this first trouble as this hosting company is getting close to strike three.

    Thank you.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Thread Starter Sinnome

    (@sinnome)

    So no one has had this issue before?

    Making a post or page should not affect file permissions (on a clean site).

    Scan your site at Sucuri and I suggest the following:

    Using an FTP Client such as FileZilla or your host provided File Manager, perform a Manual Update. This ensures that all WP core files are proper.

    Then, rename the plugin folder found at /wp-content/plugins/ to /wp-content/plugins.old/

    Next, rename every theme folder individually to /wp-content/themes/old-theme_folder_name.

    Last, upload a fresh unedited version of a default theme (twenty-x) [from here], clear your local browser cache and log into site.

    These troubleshooting steps put all your WP files to a default install, theme, no plugins. Once the site is running properly, you can troubleshoot a theme or plugin issue with the providers, and see if your issues continues.

    And since you work with adult content, I strongly encourage running multiple antivirus tools on any system you have accessed the site from or any other adult sites.

    Thread Starter Sinnome

    (@sinnome)

    @pioneer Valley Web Design – Thank you for your reply.

    However the only thing I hadn’t already done/thought of was the Sucuri scan, which I did and showed up as nothing.

    The hosting company checked ( apparently ) the wp-admin and wp-content and they state they can see nothing wrong. I do not like the idea of destroying the website we have worked on so hard. Nothing like this has happened even weeks after the latest WordPress Core update.

    I have asked about creating a new website with new install of WordPress and seeing if we can recreate the load on it. Seeing if that would put a stress on the server to crash all our websites. Still waiting for reply.

    However how can one WordPress website take out 20 others in the same directory?

    As for the adult content, this is more humor/educational ( dropping the F-bomb ) website, however still considered adult content. As a rule I don’t visit those sites as I have no interest. And statistically speaking you have a greater chance getting viruses on almost any website not just warez site or adult sites.

    Thread Starter Sinnome

    (@sinnome)

    Update:

    Just heard from the hosting company ( finally ), they state that we need to optimize our scripts. However they didn’t tell us which scripts to optimize. And really we don’t use that many scripts in the first place.

    It’s odd, however, that when disabling the plugins nothing changed the 500 Internal Server Error. Unless they’re not talking about the plugin scripts.

    And the really odd part is, these “scripts” that are using too many system resources have only started to fail in the past month, 1 year on this current hosting contract.

    We still feel it could be the fact they have moved us on to another server ( without our knowledge/consent ). Which could have different system restrictions than the first server we were on for the good part of a year.

    Is there a way to find out what the server IP was initially before our unwanted move?

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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