Do you know any good Tier 3 system administrators?

Artashes

Artashes

Administrator
Staff member
While I was away recently, one of my other media properties that runs on WordPress has "crashed". Crashed in a way that I don't understand what happened or what might be the cause of the problem.

Staff writers only tell me that one day in March the website has first gone down, then it became slow. Then suddenly only old news were being displayed. Some were getting SSL (unsafe page) warning upon trying to login to WP dashboard... The page load became a lot longer.

While some things were restored, there are still issues.

I still continue to receive many server notifications, most of which have to do with high server load, but effectively I know that we have enough RAM and it should not be an issue. So something somewhere is causing the server to generate excess activity. We've increased the RAM even further, but I still get high load alerts, which is simply impossible, unless some process have gone rogue or we are under attack. There are also other types of notifications.

I need an experienced system administrator to come in (preferably with experience in WordPress operations) to take a close look, monitor/keep an eye on the site over a few days (I'll forward every notification I receive), investigate what might be causing the issue (whether WordPress or not), install a brand new SSL certificate and optimize the server for smooth operations.

Would highly appreciate any recommendations of the person/company you had great experience dealing with!

Thanks people. :)
 
Been out of the server game for a while, but I still remember how to track things :)

You could easily have a memory leak happening and the culprit would be in the MySQL end of things. Check your resource usage with MySQL and see if there's anything crazy happening there.

Also, when it comes to WordPress, something a lot of people don't do is optimize tables, clear out junk comments and remove old page revisions. Chances are, you don't need a page revision from 6 months ago, and keeping 100 copies just ads to the database size.

You have my email, so feel free to take things out of the public forum and into email (Google Hangouts or Facebook Chat).

Adding more memory is sometimes like getting a bigger bucket in a sinking boat. You're still sinking, just slower.
 
Based on what you are saying, it sounds like your VPS died, or something happened to the hardware node and a backup was restored, which would explain why only old news was being displayed. Also why your SSL certificate stopped working. If you hit your site, and view the certificate information, is the SSL Certificate expired, or is your site simply loading HTTP over HTTPS, so it is not fully secure.

Based on how good their backup was, you may have some corrupted database tables, so that would need to be checked and fixed.

Also, as it is wordpress, there are a number of options available for speeding up a wordpress site. Memcache/Wordpress Caching/Varnish, etc that could be used to speed up access and resources.

Let me know if you have any further questions, as I can provide you some recommendations on plugins that you could install that could help, but a thorough check of your hardware may be in order to ensure that you are getting the resources and speed that you paid for (if your VPS was moved, you may have been moved to an overpopulated node) or slower hard drives.

Additionally, have you inspected your MySQL configuration? If you have a large database, your mysql configuration may not be configured correctly, so you may either have low mysql caching, or low on connections.

Last suggestion would be to check IO on your server, and to potentially turn off logging for errors and access, as depending on your logging level, your server might be writing non-stop to files and filling up IO resources that should be used to load php content.

Before I sign off, another thing to check is your TTFB (Time to First Byte) which will inform you if slowness is happening at your server level, or transfer level. If the TTFB is low, but the content is served slowly, you may also help resolve it with a CDN.

Tough to figure out its bottleneck unless inspected, but all of those things can help you run things faster =)
 
@bigredseo @komputerking

Thank you both very much for your suggestions and for the kind offer to assist! I've been working directly with the company and one referred sys admin and we've been trying to stabilize things, successfully at first. But now the site is down again and we are starting to suspect an attack.
 
Cloudflare is your friend. Jump on their free plan, they'll help mitigate any kind of dDOS attack (and do a decent job with caching, CDN, etc too).

As the other user posted, it could be an I/O thing also. It would be interesting to see if things speed up and return to normal if the system is rebooted - but in MOST cases, that shouldn't be necessary.

With regards to the site in its current state, are you able to post NEW things to the page (like news etc) and it shows up? If so, that eliminates any "full disk" or "full database table" type of issue.

Fingers crossed for a timely resolve. Such a headache to deal with!
 
There are some very highly skilled Sys Admins on Upwork from all parts of the world that can help troubleshoot server issues and charge per hour or on a fixed fee basis. Many of them are on permanent retainer with clients due to their expertise. Lots of reviews also to help decide.
 
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