Site keeps going down

Hi Lauren,

A quick check of your DNS records shows that https://www.liberonetwork.com is CNAME’d to your CDN provider, sitelock.

It also looks like your root domain has two A records which both belong to Incapsula, which I believe is the CDN partner of Sitelock.

It’s possible that the Sitelock/Incapsula CDN is going down intermittently or has its own issues – it might be worth asking them if there’s anything they can do about it.

Either way, the Jetpack diagnostics tool does report some difficulty resolving your A-record right now: https://jetpack.com/support/debug/?url=https://www.liberonetwork.com/

FWIW I’ve had similar issues with Cloudflare, but YMMV. All these “transparent” CDNs use varying levels of hackery to protect your site and they can certainly add new problems even as they solve old ones ?? It may be worth seeing if disabling or switching CDN providers solves the issue.

Regards,

Dan

Hi Dan,

Thank you so much for taking the time to review my issue and offer insight. I am sorry to say (and a bit embarassed) that I don’t understand most of what you are saying… I am not completely technically illiterate, but some of the acronyms have me lost.

I will say this, we only signed up for SiteLock yesterday and these issues have been going on much longer than that. So it’s not a SiteLock issue.

Could you perhaps clarify:
1. It also looks like your root domain has two A records which both belong to Incapsula, which I believe is the CDN partner of Sitelock.

2. FWIW I’ve had similar issues with Cloudflare, but YMMV. All these “transparent” CDNs use varying levels of hackery to protect your site

Thanks!

1. It also looks like your root domain has two A records which both belong to Incapsula, which I believe is the CDN partner of Sitelock.
[…]
2. FWIW I’ve had similar issues with Cloudflare, but YMMV. All these “transparent” CDNs use varying levels of hackery to protect your site

Since you signed up for SiteLock, some of your domain settings are now managed by SiteLock. Your site’s visits go through SiteLock before they actually reach your site. That’s what allows SiteLock (and CloudFlare) to filter the visits to your site, and lock bad people out.

I will say this, we only signed up for SiteLock yesterday and these issues have been going on much longer than that. So it’s not a SiteLock issue.

There are a few reasons that could explain why Jetpack considered your sites down while they was in fact accessible when you visited it. The most likely explanation is that your sites were up, but loaded too slowly.

Jetpack tries to access your site every 5 minutes. When Jetpack’s Monitoring agent notices that your site is down (or can’t be loaded in less than 10 seconds), it tries to load your site again twice from that server location. If that fails too, it tries again from 2 other locations on 2 different continents, with timeouts of 20 seconds this time. If these 2 fail, we consider the site as down and send you an email. By that point, I think it’s fair to consider that there is a problem with your site.

Your site could get very slow, or go down, because someone else, hosted on the same server as you, is using so many resources that they slow the whole server down, including your site.
Usually, hosting providers have automated processes to check for that kind of abuse of resources on their servers. When someone on your server is acting up, they get blocked or their access to server resources becomes limited.

What could be happening here, is that your hosting provider takes action against the abuse fairly quickly, and by the time you check your site after receiving Jetpack’s notice, the site is already back up.

We can’t know for sure, though. Your hosting provider will know, though. I’d recommend contacting them, and giving them a few examples of the timestamps when your site went down. They’ll be able to check their logs to find out what happened around that time on your site and on other sites on the server.
They will be able to solve the issue, or move you to a different server.

I hope this clarifies things a bit.

Thanks, Jeremy. This definitely clarifies things! My hosting company did inform me that it was my site utilizing excess resources so they had limited access. I thought this sounded a bit shady on their part (because they didn’t contact me about it); however, I suppose it’s comforting to have you say doing that is a normal process.

It seems our site needs some optimization work done to it.

I will chat with SiteLock. Are you saying it’s a bad thing to have this service on a site? We literally just signed up because it seems like a good idea to have the extra security to protect us from attacks….

Are you saying it’s a bad thing to have this service on a site? We literally just signed up because it seems like a good idea to have the extra security to protect us from attacks….

Not at all! Website Application Firewalls are a good way to protect your site from attackers, and block them before they can even reach your site. I personally use CloudFlare, but I’m sure SiteLock works too.

My hosting company did inform me that it was my site utilizing excess resources so they had limited access.
[…]
It seems our site needs some optimization work done to it.

2 plugins can help you understand what’s eating up so many resources:
https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/debug-bar/
https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/query-monitor/

Hopefully this can help you find you how to optimize your site to avoid such issues in the future.

Thank you, Jeremy. You have been so incredibly helpful! I will check out those plugins (I also found an excellent step-by-step resource). Take Care!