“This site is experiencing technical difficulties” — can DNS changes cause?

  • Dear WordPress troubleshooters,

    I have several WordPress websites on a reseller hosting plan (essentially just a more advanced type of shared hosting in which each domain gets its own Cpanel which providers better isolation).

    Yesterday, the host announced that they needed to move my data to a new server, with a new IP address.

    As I use Cloudflare, I had to update the DNS A records manually.

    Now, however, all my WordPress-based websites are displaying the mysterious “this site is experiencing technical difficulties” message.

    I am wondering if this message can be triggered by the simple fact that the DNS change is still propagating (somehow) or whether this is likely to reflect a more significant problem, such as a PHP version mismatch between the old server and the new.

    My host is being completely useless despite the fact that this migration (announced with 30 minutes notice) basically caused the problem and has taken 20 websites I own and manage offline.

    Any advice appreciated!

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • Tyler

    (@tylerthedude)

    Hi there,

    The DNS propagation could have played a role in this, but if you’re properly able to access the site then this is probably not the case. Do you know what version of PHP the new site is running under? You can use the phpinfo(); function to display your PHP configuration and see if the version is compatible with WordPress’ standards. If not, you may need to upgrade your version of PHP and see if that helps.

    Also, the new server may not have certain PHP extensions installed that plugins use in order to properly support its codebase. Make sure all of the extensions installed on the new site are the same as the ones previously installed on the old site’s configuration.

    You might try temporarily moving the plugins from the wp-content/plugins/ directory into a directory that’s not publicly accessible and see if this helps. There could be a plugin requiring an extension that’s not available on the new server so it’s resulting in this WordPress error.

    Also, you might try turning on WP debug and see if there are any errors being displayed and from those errors, you can hopefully find a solution.

    Thanks!
    Tyler

    Thread Starter drosehill

    (@drosehill)

    Hi @tylerthedude – and thanks for the response!

    Agh, I was thinking just that.

    The new server my host migrated to is running PHP 7.2.

    They deleted my accounts on the older server after the migration, so I’m not able to check what version they were running — or what extensions were enabled (it’s only shared hosting so I don’t have SSH / root access).

    I tried the debug mode. It threw up one plugin error so I deleted that plugin but now there’s just nothing but that error when I load the homepage.

    Seems pretty safe to say that it’s a server-side problem anyway so I really hope that my host can resolve the issue — they’ve just taken down 20 WordPress sites I operate!

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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