Mika Epstein

emalave – Why DreamHost? If this is something you know about and I can fix, I’d love to know!

Of course load time looks good NOW, three days later (I was on a vacation sorry, I do try to stay on top of this).

If you still need help, give a shout and I’ll bang on plugins and servers and themes for you ??

Sure thing ?? Always happy to dig into sites and plugins (And WF, I know how to email you ?? you’re good peeps!)

We’re seeing sites with poorly configured WordFence setups running slowly. Just the same as we see sites with badly configured caches :/ Nature of the beasts.

In a few cases, people have scans that never finish, and while we DO tell them to read your helpful FAQ ( https://support.wordfence.com/support/solutions/articles/1000011129-my-scans-don-t-finish-what-can-i ) many times people are setting things up to run longer than a shared host would reasonably allow which causes the site to slow down. Realistically, the scan WILL slow you down a bit, as we said “if the site is not properly configured or optimized”

No caching, big sites, big scans, shared hosting? Sure, that can slow you down. That’s often why we say ‘Okay, let’s turn off Security/BackupApps and see if that speeds things up!’ The reason we start there is we probably saw your site was making a lot of self-reflective calls, and that’s usually a sign that it’s asking itself to do a lot of work.

If you’d like to share your domain, or email me at mika.epstein AT dreamhost.com, I may be able to pinpoint exactly why we identified it as a problem.

How do I go about setting a password manually? Will I be able to do that as long as I have FTP access?

Before you do that, rename the plugins folder. I know theotherlebowski says to try resetting first, but frankly, plugins first is a better bet.

If you’re trying to use W3 Total Cache’s interface with our install of Xcache, it won’t work right now :/

I saw you’re on PHP 5.4, so I went and bumped your PHP memory to see if that would help any.

Just to clarify at DreamHost, we actually secretly set up all severs with mod_cloudflare so it’s magically ready for anyone ?? But that is, literally, a server setting.

Just to clarify, it’s not that it has to be a DREAMHOST email, it’s that the email has to match your domain.

So if you’re on mycooldomain.com, then the from emails should be [email protected] ??

Jetpack gets around this by using the [email protected] email

Hi, I took a quick look at your site and it was, sadly, still hacked.

I cleaned out your wp-config.php file, as well as force cleaned WP’s core files, but what you need to do is actually go through and delete all the plugins and themes and reinstall them from a clean source.

https://wiki.dreamhost.com/WordPress_Hacks

You have a lot of unused themes out there, and they may be the backdoor if you haven’t been keeping them up to date.

I went ahead and did that for you, actually, renaming the plugins.

I also turned off your cache manually, flushing it by force on the server, so you should be able to log in now.

That’s … insane. That should never happen that your IP gets blocked.

I took a look at your site and the only odd thing I see are calls like this:

ModSecurity: Access denied with code 503 (phase 2). Pattern match "(?i:UPDATE.+SET)" at ARGS:cookie. [file "/dh/apache2/template/etc/mod_sec2/modsecurity_crs_46_slr_et_wordpress_attacks.conf"] [line "111"] [id "2004016"] [rev "6"] [msg "SLR: ET WEB_SPECIFIC_APPS WordPress SQL Injection Attempt -- admin-ajax.php cookie UPDATE"] [data ""] [severity "CRITICAL"] [tag "web-application-attack"] [tag "url,www.securityfocus.com/bid/24076"] [hostname "lnkproductions.org"] [uri "/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php"] [unique_id "U9XkQtBxo8gAADfFD9QAAAAM"]

And it’s tied in to the edit.php file. So that tells me the removing is triggering our security checks. But I don’t see anything that should cause that. Can you test on another browser?

I don’t know what HTTPS has to do with this, but I looked at your sites and saw you have an account on both domains.

When you change the password via PHPMyAdmin, you MUST be sure to set the type to md5, or the password won’t work.

Did you try the normal ’email me a lost password’ setting?

FYI, the /tmp folder on Shared is (logically enough) shared with all users on the server.

max_Q, what’s your domain? I can see if tmp got full.

esmi, if there’s any debugging I can do for you on the box, let me know ??

Hey Felix, I work at DreamHost and wanted to be sure that you knew about a weird catch to our system. You can’t send emails from WP unless the to AND from address is the same as your domain. So if you’re trying to send emails from example.com to [email protected], it’ll die. This was a spammer killer manuver.

If that’s your case, and I bet it is since you say ‘as user and as admin’, you’ll want to use an SMTP configuration plugin like https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/configure-smtp/ (yes, it’s old, but Scott is on the plugin review team and his code is awesome). Install it, activate it, don’t make any settings changes (yeah I know!) and try it. If that doesn’t work, then you may need to put in your DreamHost SMTP settings, but many times it just works.

I’ll be following this topic now so if I can help out, you betcha I will!

If you’re still having this, please open a ticket and tell us it’s a jetpack issue.

We THOUGHT we rebooted everything who had the problem (forcing the new, fixed, rules down, but clearly we missed a couple). Sorry about that. I need a nap :/