Sites Gone Down - Can Anyone Help With This?

[Jasper68]

Hey there.

Just doing a new post on one of my sites and was unable to save. Took a nosey around and all my sites (only two of any importance) are down.

Seems like index.php has been executing on my older site and has hit 20,000 script executions, which is the 24 hour limit I believe on my Go Geek Siteground plan

So it's all offline. Their livechat is closed but not sure what I should do to stop whatever is executing script, not a big influx of visitors, that is normal

Here is a pic

Any advice appreciated

Cheers

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I'm actually onto them now, hopefully can get it sorted.

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I'm back up, but no idea what is fucking with the index.php file, she suggested it could be a plugin perhaps, but I have no idea. She has give me a higher limit so that I can get it fixed without the site going down. Where to start?

 

[built]

How many plugins do you have installed and what are they?

 

[Jasper68]

Hey there

I have these. I actually played around with the ad inserter one, which is displaying a couple of Amazon Native Ads and some ads via the Ezoic system. Requests seem to have done down to a more normal level, my problem is I just don't really have the analytic skills and knowledge to understand what could be causing it.

All seems relatively sane again now, but other than the site also taking 10 seconds to load, this is another issue I need to get on top of.

Thanks for the support

GP Premium is just the paid update for Generate Press, to give more options for colors, layout etc that you don't get with the free version.

 

[CCarter]

I can tell you right now off that screenshot if that inode usage is correct, you've got some crazy plugin tying up all your resources.

Here is what I suggest doing:

#1. Upgrade your plan to a higher plan, that allows for more resources - whatever resource is hitting the limit. Now if you cannot afford to increase your hosting plan to the next level - that means you aren't making enough to even cover your hosting, you might want to consider selling or shutting down the website because it cannot even pay for it's own existence and your time can be spent doing something else that's more profitable. If there really is no higher plan with your provider than you've outgrown them and need to find a better solution.

#2. Hire a system admin to look into which plugin is causing the most CPU usage - it will require them to have shell access and monitor the behavior of the site.

#3. I'd turn off all your plugins down to none. But I'm an extremist and don't recommend wordpress at all. So get down to 3 is a good number - the ones that make you the most money, keep those and dump the rest, and see if that helps.

#4. It could be that you may have been compromised (hacked) due to a bad/old plugin and someone is using your wordpress site to send spam out and that's the reason for the sudden spike in resources usage - you need your system admin to figure that out. So look for newly updated files on your system, there are linux commands to help with this:

files changed in the last 5 minutes (within current directory):

find . -cmin -5

files changed in the last 50 days (within current directory):

find . -ctime -50

--

Those are the steps I suggest you go through.

 

[Jasper68]

Thanks for the feedback @CCarter - Things seem to have settled down for now, but there were 21 094 executions on index.php for this one site in the last 24 hours.

I turned almost everything off and am down to 3 plugins for now. Will see what happens.

I could deffo go onto a higher plan, but am pondering what to do with the site. I have 400-500 visitors a day, but I don't really monetise them any more, planning to try a few things to help with that.

But year, it could end up being a case of binning it and starting over.

If things go looney again in the next 24 hrs I'll find someone to take a look.

 

[Ryuzaki]

If you are NOT running PHP 7 yet, try this GoDaddy plugin: P3 Profiler. Don't use it if you do use PHP 7. The reviews include the author himself saying it's not ready for PHP 7 and crashes sites.

What this will do is help you determine which of your plugins is eating up an insane amount of resources. Assuming there's no issues like CCarter pointed out, this can help you find out which ones you're using that are just poorly coded and resource intensive.

I have 400-500 visitors a day, but I don't really monetise them any more

That makes no sense, bruh. Why are we here if not to monetize our visitors? This isn't charity work. Make money.

 

[chanilla]

This is 99% likely to be a continuation of the issues you haven't addressed from before. It's not going to get any better on shared hosting... You need to address the core of the problem in the first place.

 

[Jasper68]

This is 99% likely to be a continuation of the issues you haven't addressed from before. It's not going to get any better on shared hosting... You need to address the core of the problem in the first place.

Yeah, I know, there is certainly something shitty going on.

It's not loaded at less that 5-6 seconds for ages, I got fed up and frustrated and just left it. Closer to 10 seconds now :-(

I just don't have the spare cash to fork out on someone to fix it, and the site is making fuck all really, $40-50 pm in ad revenue, so I might just leave it and keep the plugins to a minimum, see where it goes.

That said, one would think 10 sec loading time would impact rankings for sure :-)

Here is the P3 profiler graph, as expected Thrive Architect is slowing things up, but the load times hardly reduce even when I deactivate that, so it's a small part of the issue I would imagine.

 

[Ryuzaki]

My guess is that between you tinkering yourself and all of the plugins coming in and out (I'd guess you've tried and tested a lot more than you had installed) that they've left all kinds of transient issues.

You probably have files 404-ing, orphaned tables and data in your MySQL database, broken javascript that ends up blocking rendering until there's a timeout, leftover scripts in your header or footer making calls for ads or pixels you aren't even using, etc.

 

[Jasper68]

You probably have files 404-ing, orphaned tables and data in your MySQL database, broken javascript that ends up blocking rendering until there's a timeout, leftover scripts in your header or footer making calls for ads or pixels you aren't even using, etc.

I think you could be right, I am sure there is all manner of redundant shit there, will have to go through some stuff and see what I can fix.

Cheers

 

[Steve]

not a big influx of visitors

How are you checking that? Raw server logs or something like analytics?
It could easily be some kind of ddos attack, that wont show up if its not loading any resources.
How many pages/posts are on the site, if there are loads it could be a rogue spider crawling everything.
If you dont have any dynamic content in regular pages, turn on full page caching in cloudflare and your server can pretty much go to sleep.

 

[Jasper68]

How are you checking that? Raw server logs or something like analytics?
It could easily be some kind of dos attach, that wont show up if its not loading any resources.
How many pages/posts are on the site, if there are loads it could be a rogue spider crawling everything.
If you dont have any dynamic content in regular pages, turn on full page caching in cloudflare and your server can pretty much go to sleep.

Yes, analytics, but I blocked bots on that the other day. There are around 100 posts and 20 pages or so. I have Cloudflare and caching is enabled on it.

I'm gonna try and learn a bit, if I break it, it's not the end of the world, more of a vanity site really, gets me some traffic which I make little money out of :-)

 

[Steve]

check your actual server logs anyway, it wont take a second.

Cloudflare cache by default just caches static assets (css, js, images), but you can set it up via a page rule to cache everything, dramatically reducing server load