Constant Crashing WordPress – 500 Internal Server Error

  • Hi,
    I’ve been using WordPress for a fairly good amount of time. I know how things work and till now, I’ve never needed any help at this degree before. Before I tell you what the problem is, I want to give some details about my website. My website has lately pretty low hits due to our low activity on the site, so I don’t think there’s any problem with the bandwidth, but interestingly this domain attracts a lot of spam, and half of our members are spam. We’ve been using a free theme previously but we moved to the premium theme, we’re using now. Before you assume that the new theme is the cause, I want to point out that we tested the site on maintenance mode for 2 weeks and there was no problem. Then we decided to backup the old site for a moment to see how it was before by using UpdraftPlus plugin, but I accidentally refreshed the page and it gave us 500 internal server error. We tackled the issue by reuploading the .htaccess file. However, our problems didn’t come to an end after that day. Our website keeps going down and suddenly starts working all it own. I checked the error log a couple times, but it’s always a different error. Once it was about out of memory allocation, the other time it was about “ss” code added to .htaccess.

    All I can say is we always fix this problem by uploading old .htaccess file, but this is really annoying and if you’ve encountered this problem before, please let me know. My only plan to deal with that right now is to upload all the core files of WordPress again.

    My website is booklady.com
    Thank you

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)

  • Have you tried deactivating all plugins and switching to a default theme to see if that makes any difference? If so, reverse your steps one by one to see which it is.

    Have you checked with your hosting company?

    Thread Starter Aqeart

    (@aqeart)

    I’ve checked with my hosting company. We’re still waiting for them to run a security scan on the site. It’s too dodgy for us to deactivate everything and take it back. Though I’m not sure why whenever I deactivate-activate a theme, all the changes I made disappears which means a lot of extra work. The worst of all, I don’t know when the site crashes. It just happens and I am notified by emails, thanks to Jetpack.

    It’s too dodgy for us to deactivate everything and take it back.

    What do you mean by too dodgy? It’s standard troubleshooting and people do it all the time. Themes should not lose settings by being deactivated. What theme is this that’s doing that?

    Thread Starter Aqeart

    (@aqeart)

    Actually, Mystile, the theme I previously had that weird feature. The website was looking weird whenever I passed that process. Maybe dodgy was a wrong word, but even if I deactivate everything I don’t know how long to wait. Crashes are sporadic, and I have more than 40 plugins, all of them are necessary for my website. I tried deactivating most of them before, but it didn’t work.

    Andrew Nevins

    (@anevins)

    WCLDN 2018 Contributor | Volunteer support

    You can set up WordPress locally to test these things: https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Installing_WordPress#Local_Installation_Instructions

    It reduces the dodgyness

    Yeah, that’s a good idea – or perhaps set up a site in a sub-directory on your server and start without anything added to the site and see if you have similar issues. If not, start adding your theme and plugins one by one until you get the same behavior.

    Unfortunately, there’s not an easy way to track down intermittent problems like these, and often, they are server related.

    You could also enable debugging to see what shows up on your site error logs –

    https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Debugging_in_WordPress

    Thread Starter Aqeart

    (@aqeart)

    Thanks!
    But is there any explanation for unexpected crashes on the site and changes in the .htaccess file?

    P.S. Changes are mostly like extra two spaces or a deleted line without any character missing.

    Thread Starter Aqeart

    (@aqeart)

    Yeah, that’s a good idea – or perhaps set up a site in a sub-directory on your server and start without anything added to the site and see if you have similar issues. If not, start adding your theme and plugins one by one until you get the same behavior.

    Unfortunately, there’s not an easy way to track down intermittent problems like these, and often, they are server related.

    You could also enable debugging to see what shows up on your site error logs –

    https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Debugging_in_WordPress

    Thanks! I will start debugging process, I hope it will work. However, I’m already planning to change my hosting company because of low memory allocated for my website. It might be easier to let the experts work it out on my new host, since it might be related to a security issue.

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)
  • The topic ‘Constant Crashing WordPress – 500 Internal Server Error’ is closed to new replies.