Please help me discover why my site goes down every week

  • Hello all, I’m finally opening a topic here as I’m getting desperate with the problems I am experiencing. Basically what is happening is that almost weekly, my main site dbzer0.com will suddenly go down with “internal server errors”. I am currently hosted with Dreamhost on a VPS which means my RAM is limited to 150MB (but I can increase it at will).

    Normally, those 150Mb are more than enough for 4 WordPress sies and 2 Gallery2 installations but at these (random?) points, my RAM usage will spike and all of them (which are on the same VPS) will go down.

    This is definitely related to only dbzer0.com as when this happens I can’t access this site, no matter how much I increase my resources and I can avoid the usage spike by simply taking down only this site (renaming the root directory to something else for example) everything else keeps working splendidly. But as soon as I rename the dir back to its original name everything stops once more)

    I have tried many things to resolve it, even going as far as replacing my WP installation with a “factory default” one (so-to-speak) with no plugins and just the default theme. As soon as I restored the dir site usage once again spiked.

    I suspected a DDOS but I am quite a small fish so I can’t imagine why this would happen. I also checked my access.log and didn’t find much evidence to support this. I suspected web crawlers and I’ve even ammended my bots.txt file to slow them down but this keeps going on.

    I am really at the end of my wits. Is there anything you can suggest I should look for? Any way to troubleshoot this? Currently the site is down (I’ve renamed the dir again) and I lack ssh access as I’m currently behind a corporate firewall and lack internet access at home for the moment. So I can use only FTP for now.

    I’ve also contacted Dreamhost about this but in the past they haven’t been of much help with issues such as these and can take up to 2 days to respond so I’m not expecting help soon from there.

    So please, help?

Viewing 7 replies - 31 through 37 (of 37 total)
  • Thread Starter db0

    (@db0)

    Thanks. For the record, I’ve already tried that, but without a DB wipe as well.

    This same thing is happening to me almost every day now. Unfortunately most of what you are all saying is like a complete foreign language to me (I wish I knew more so that I could figure this out!!) but what I do know is that my site keeps going down and usually optimizing the options table helps. But then it goes down again – sometimes almost immediately. I installed the WP-Optimize plugin (recommended by Dreamhost help) and have been optimizing regularly but my site still is going down. When I contacted Dreamhost about this, they said that the problem is with WordPress – is that the case? Thanks for your help!

    Thread Starter db0

    (@db0)

    I’m still having similar issues although they occur much more rarely lately. Can you let me know what plugins you have activated?

    Absolutely. All the plugins I have are:

    AdSense Manager
    Akismet
    All in One Adsense and YPN
    Date Exclusion
    Disable WordPress Core Update
    Disable WordPress Plugin Updates
    Extended Comment Options
    FeedBurner FeedSmith
    FeedBurner Widget
    FeedStats
    Google Analyticator
    Google XML Sitemaps
    Highlight Author Comments
    WordPress.com Stats
    WordPress Database Backup
    WordPress Hashcash
    WP-DBManager
    WP-FLV
    WP-Optimize
    WP Super Cache

    More than happy to get rid of any that you think might cause the problem? Thanks so much for your help!

    Down again this morning. Along with the 500 Internal Server Error I’m also getting this error message:

    Error establishing a database connection

    This either means that the username and password information in your wp-config.php file is incorrect or we can’t contact the database server at mysql.handmadebyalissa.com. This could mean your host’s database server is down.

    * Are you sure you have the correct username and password?
    * Are you sure that you have typed the correct hostname?
    * Are you sure that the database server is running?

    If you’re unsure what these terms mean you should probably contact your host. If you still need help you can always visit the WordPress Support Forums.

    Thanks!

    Wow – dreamhost sounds like it kind of sucks. Alissa, have you tried installing the plugin hypercache? You definitely want to get rid of supercache, that is known to have problems with dreamhost as one commentor says above. I’m also wondering why you have these two plugins: Disable WordPress Core Update, Disable WordPress Plugin Updates? I would think you should want the updates to make sure that the plugins are getting updated regularly, could that be the problem?

    Also, have you tried cleaning your database using WP-DBManager?

    Will give all of this a shot! Thank so much Wess!!

Viewing 7 replies - 31 through 37 (of 37 total)
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