Database issues

@omavaraisuushaaste

I did check your site now & it works fine.
But as you say , the site becomes unstable sometimes , can you post some details on what sort of errors / issues you get like 500 errors or any other errors visible on the screen when you access the site ?
Post some screenshots with the errors , that will help to understand better.
BTW: You seem to have installed a lot of plugins .
Because I see your site is more or less a blogging one (correct me if I’m wrong) , do you really need all of these plugins for your site?

Thanks for you reply Sundar!

Yes you are correct, it’s just a personal blog. Forgot to mention that in the opening post.

I think the most common two errors are:

“500 internal server error” and
“Error establishing a database connection”

I will take screen captures if the site gets an error in the following days.

Also, good thing that you mentioned that I have a lot of plugins as I don’t really know what is actually a lot or good amount of plugins in a normal blog, hmm. Here are the plugins and the reasons for them. Also, I would like to here input on the performance enhanching ones, do they actually enhance performance in a website, which is mostly text.

From what I have understood the must plugins are:

– Akismet-spam(well, because spam)
– Disable Gutenberg (tried Gutenberg for a while, but doesn’t really work well with a full-text blog)
Header and Footer Scripts/Say What? (needed for affiliate marketing links as I don’t want to touch the actual code)
– Jetpack by WordPress.com (I guess this is a must have for all blogs?)
– Login LockDown (safety is nice)
– Yoast SEO (not a SEO guru yet, so this one helps a ton)

And the additional ones are for me:

– Annual Archive (well this I could delete)
– Google Analytics (I could live without, but still useful)
– Link Manager (No need at the moment)
– No Self Pings (not necessary, but don’t really care about self pings)
– OPML (well, this one I can delete)
– WP to Twitter (Saves time a lot)
– WP User Avatar(this one not necessary)

Here I can delete a few, but I don’t think the plugins are that big, so I don’t know if it makes a lot of difference.

And about the performance enhancing ones:

– Really Simple SSL
– WP Super Cache
– WP-Optimize
– WP-Sweep
– Smush

Well the SSL one is necessary if I want to run SSL on my site. About the other ones, I feel like everyone on the internet says that every site should have these ones. But I wonder if all those optimizations, sweeps and smushs are necessary for a blog, which has only test (and maybe 1-2 pictures per post)? Or do they actually make the blog just heavier?

Thanks again!

If those errors are happening only sometimes, expecailly the database connection issue, that means that the server is overloaded and can’t handle the load from your site (or from any one or more of the other sites running on it as well). That’s nothing that youcan fix. You will need to get your hosting company to either upgrade the server or move your site to a new server that has available resources. You may also need to look at upgrading your hosting plan if you have one that has various limits imposed on it.

Catacaustic: Thanks! I was thinking about if upgrading the hosting would help this as well (currently I have the most basic hosting service from bluehost). I think they upgraded the server when I asked them the 5th/6th time about the same error, but it seems like the errors still randomly happen.

However, when I asked this from the bluehost CSR, they said, that the issue is in the process running in my website (too many plugins, too much load to the database) and there is no need for me to upgrade the hosting service. I took their word for it as I thought, anyone would have jumped to the opportunity to sell me the better hosting plan if it would actually help.

What do you think, did the CSR know what they were talking about or is hosting plan actually related to the database of my website?

@omavaraisuushaaste

From my experience , a basic plan would be sufficient for running a personal blog with limited traffic.
You might need to consider upgrading the server only when the bandwidth is not enough to handle the traffic to your site.

Try to de-activate & remove unwanted plugins , keep only the necessary plugins .
This should solve the issues you encounter.

If you still encounter such issues, then check the error logs / access logs on your server , that should give you some insight on the problem , based on which you can take necessary actions.

Make sure to monitor the web server & database servers .

Thanks @phptechie ! I’ll try to delete even more plugins and we’ll see what happens. I will get back to the forums if the problems still continue to occur and try to look at the logs of what could be the issue.