What what you do if WordPress site had this issue?

  • I have a somewhat big WordPress site which in the last few months typically one or two times a day goes offline for under a minute. I get email from pingdom monitoring about offline and 1 minute later online notification.

    There is no pattern in this behaviour. It does not seem to be server load related as it happens at night too and I am pretty sure it is not related to the webhosting (Litespeed server) as I have seen the same behavior on two different hosts and the hosts cannot see anything is wrong at their end when my site has this issue. And I am not seeing it on any other sites I have at the same hosts.

    There is nothing in the error.log at the time the site goes briefly offline.

    Any suggetions how to find the cause of this issue? As it is a production site where some plugins are needed I cannot really test say for a day with all plugins turned off. I have reinstalled WordPress files and all plugins are updated.

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  • The only thing that you can do is check the access and error logs to see what’s happening. If you need to, talk to your hosting company to see if there’s any way to get more verbose logs, and see what happens around those times.

    Alternatively, try another monitoring service as well, and see if the new one reports the same outages as the existing one.

    And remember, it’s not always the server that’s the problem. Sometimes (not often, but does happen) the networking systems that lead up to the server have issues, so the site won’t be responsive, but the server won’t have fallen over. There’s a lot of possiblities, but only your hosting comany is going to be able to look into that side of things.

    Hello,

    I would suggest creating a staging copy of the website. If you are not aware your hosting can help you.

    On staging site, where it has a separate code and its respective DB, we can try to debug a bit by deactivating plugins and switching the theme. Staging Site can be helpful in finding the root cause of the issue.

    Alternatively, check if there are any background cronjobs set or do you find any suspicious activities like unwanted comments, bad code etc.

    Try to install the security plugins and scan the file once.

    Let me know if this information helps.

    Thanks.

    Thread Starter boborg

    (@boborg)

    Thanks for your replies. Since posting the question I have moved the site to a third non litespeed server based host and using WP Rocket for caching there. Since doing this no downtime notifications so if that continues I think I can narrow it down to something Litespeed related since both previous hosts were Litespeed based. That is the only difference I can think of. Same PHP version and files maybe apart from the .htaccess file which had some litespeed stuff in it compared to now with WP Rocket stuff instead.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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