WP won't save draft or publish for HOURS/DAYS

Have you considered using another hosting company?

I’ve had this hosting company since 2008 and never had a problem until a few months ago – are you saying this is not a wordpress issue? I’ve seen other people on the forums over the years mentioning this same problem from time to time and the solutions suggested to them, which I’ve tried, haven’t worked.

Based on everything you’ve tried, you’ve kind of run through all the possibilities in WP. After that, you hit Host problems.

Are there any errors in your error log?

Do you have any custom changes to revisions or otherwise in your wp-config file?

I called the hosting company and they looked thru everything and said some of my databases were out of date with latin1 and needed to be converted to UTF-8 and to use the “UTF-8 Database Converter” plugin, so I’m trying that now…

Ok, I’ve installed the plugin and converted the databases.

And….no joy. Same problem, post won’t save draft.

And the hosting company say they can’t help unless the error is reproducible, but it shows up at random times.

I could be trying to save draft and it won’t work, I go to bed for a few hours, then try again and suddenly it will work, and all I’ve done was press the same save draft button I did a few hours previously!

Any other ideas?

What OS is this on? Windows XP, Vista 7 or a Mac?

I use Windows Vista Home Premium

And I’ve even tried bringing my laptop to the library and using their wifi, but still no joy.

This still sounds more like a hosting issue to me. The bit about changing the db tables is a red herring. If that was a real issue, the content would never get saved whilst here it does – eventually. Badly overloaded server?

I just checked with them again, and while they said that they aren’t able to reproduce the error, they say that in March (when my problems began) they put filters on their servers to prevent hacking or spamming, and that somehow my posts are setting off those protections, even though they say they’ve looked over my stuff and can find nothing in my content that could possibly be triggering that, and can’t explain why sometimes the same content that won’t publish, will suddenly be able to publish on a random basis.

I”m thinking of switching hosts if this doesn’t resolve soon. They grudgingly said they would have a supervisor look into it, even though their policy is to not do that if they can’t reproduce the error.

Also recently I’ve gotten some comments that my pages are taking longer to load, so maybe it is an overloaded server they’re not admitting to. I’ll follow up on that, thanks.

OOOHH! Ask them if they fiddled with mod_security

Just got these two emails from my hosting company:

Dear Lara,

Thank you for contacting Technical Support. I have reviewed your account and I was able able replicate the issue we are seeing. It appears that whenever a post is saved, whether published or drafted, it is communicating with some outside server, and that communication appears to be formatted oddly which is causing the server’s Security System to flag and block the process.

I am going to go ahead and escalate this issue to our Administrators so they can get an exception added to the Security System. Once this is done, this should correct the errors you were getting.

We will reply again once the admins have added the exception to the system.

—
Best Regards,

Seth Jensen
midPhase Technical Support Manager

AND

Dear Lara,

We have added an exception for the security rule triggered previously. If you encounter any further errors please reply back with the steps to re-create the issue and we will take a look. Thank you.

—
Best Regards,

David Winans
Systems Administrator
MidPhase
———————————————-
So I just tried to save a draft and publish it and it worked, but that’s happened before. Buy anyway, hopefully this time their fix will work.

Thank you everyone so much for all of your help. All of your suggestions were valuable in getting the hosting company to focus on a probable direction instead of claiming this or that problem with wordpress, like they were before I started trying all of your suggestions.

I appreciate the kind support from everyone here on the forums!
Sincerely,
Lara N.

It appears that whenever a post is saved, whether published or drafted, it is communicating with some outside server, and that communication appears to be formatted oddly which is causing the server’s Security System to flag and block the process.

Imagine I’m raising my eyebrow like Spock.

That’s interesting. It’s possible you have a plugin that’s calling out, but since you stripped everything down it’s highly unlikely. There’s no phone-out feature in WP when you safe a post as DRAFT. When you publish, yes, it’s sending out ping information if you left that turned on, but wow are they neglectful to not have tested that first ?? It’s not like WP is an uncommon app.

Well, at least we got them to own up to something. ??