I contacted the upCloud support and they said to check server uptime with uptime command, and it was up from the time , I created the server. I am also monitoring the website and server PING in Pingdom, no downtime there.
Ping uses ICMP, and uptime just means the host… ie the physical or virtual server… is running. They don’t say anything about any software running on the server.
Even if you never installed your Apache webserver software (which is required for websites to run), you’d still see your uptime and get ping replies. So those two tests don’t really say much about the kind of problem you’re having.
And your hosting provider asking you to run the uptime command is their polite way of saying that you have an unmanaged (aka self-managed) server from them, and their responsibility ends when you see the server is running ??
Problems like this should definitely be logged somewhere on your server.
So check your server’s logs to know exactly what’s happening on the server when Cloudflare is unable to connect to it (ie 502 gateway error).
Once you know what the problem is, only then can you work out a solution.
Details about website and server:
Website Traffic: About 470k a month
Server: $80 per month plan on upCloud
Server config: Ubuntu 20.4 LTS, Apache2, PHP FPM 7.4 and MariaDB
I’ve checked the specs of the server on upCloud’s website, and this server should be able to cope with this load if the server and WordPress are properly tuned for performance.
If you’re getting this much traffic and these downtimes are affecting your bottom line, and if you don’t eat and breathe “server administration” every minute, I’ll highly suggest you switch to a managed WordPress hosting provider, rather than using a self-managed cloud server.
Specific hosting recommendations are not allowed here, but there are several reputable managed WordPress hosting providers out there that can handle your site at about the same (or even less) cost as what you’re paying now.
And I’m talking of serious WordPress hosts with custom-built WordPress hosting infrastructure (eg WordPress.com, LiquidWeb, Kinsta, Pressable, WPEngine, etc)… and not cPanel/Plesk traditional shared hosting providers that have simply branded their shared hosting as “managed WordPress hosting”.
Good luck!
