The Day my Blog went down

I have been experiencing some issues with my blog URL the last few days. I wasn’t too sure what it could be, so I started to google a few things and asked a few fellow bloggers to see if they have any idea what it could be.

Yesterday then it got to the point of being unresponsive. It was taking minutes to load and at some point I was even getting an error message telling me that “the webpage is not available”. As you can imagine, if something happens like this to your blog, you would be sweating, thinking what it could and how to resolve it as soon as possible.

The first thing I tried to do, before I tried to attempt to fix anything, I ran my Dropbox backup plugin. It was kind of done but came up with error messages, possibly because the whole website wasn’t working right any more in the first place.

Then I continued on to start optimizing all my images as I have heard and read this can slow down things when loading your website. I generally just upload them and that’s it. I never actually check the size of them. There were a whole loads of them, 1089 images. You can imagine how long it takes to optimize all those. I didn’t think it would take that long but at 139 images it suddenly crashed again which was in the afternoon and nothing worked at all. Either it was extremely slow or I was getting the error message again.

My next go to person was my actual host company. I have to admit, I have actually never ever logged onto their website into my panel section. The only time was, when I actually moved to them and set up my database etc. so this was all new to me. I am with a hosting company called Bluehost who are based in America so a phone call can be a tricky with them. Luckily though they have a live chat which is available 24/7.
Once the kids were in bed, I got comfy in bed and went on to sort this out with them. While speaking to a guy Nathan, he said to me that there is some sort of issue with one of their servers. I waited patiently but unfortunately he couldn’t give me an estimated time when this will be fixed. I am used to it, because I work in this stuff, I know how hard it can be to give a time when something more complex has to be fixed.

This morning I tried to load my website, it was loading at a kind of decent speed but still not perfect. Shortly after, I was getting the error message again. So it looked like they still haven’t sorted it.  After I dropped the kids to crèche I had a quick look at their opening hours for calling the helpdesk. This was not 24/7 so I had no other option but starting another chat with them. They are probably sick of me by now!
I was told to create a ticket with them and they will then email then once the issue is sorted. Not longer after that I received an email from them…

“Your web hosting account for janineslittleworld.com has been deactivated, as of 11/04/2015. (reason: site causing performance problems) This deactivation was due to a Terms of Service violation associated with your account. At sign-up, all users state that they have read through, understand, and agree to our terms. These terms are legal and binding”. What? My hosting company temporarily deactivated my account. I had no idea what was going on and what they were on about and specifically why it was deactivated since April as I have been using it fine up until a few days ago. I went onto the chat again. This time I was speaking to Russell who told me what the issue was. I am on a shared server and everybody who was on that, slowed down their sites, this is the reason why I was suspended from it. The main reason this has happened is due to file called “wp-cron.php”. Russell was not able to help any further until I had this sorted myself and only then he would be able to re-activate my account again.

Luckily I work in an IT company and one of the developers was looking into this and found the issue. I was able to pinpoint the issue then and could disable this file from my cpanel in Bluehost. I also managed to disable all my plugins under the file manager… just in case. With this information I went back onto the chat and spoke to Casey. (I must have spoken to every support agent possible at this stage) She checked the whole situation and luckily she re-activated my account again. What a relief!

Here I am, sitting on the couch in the living room writing my first proper post again with no slow downs and it feels good. I have a lot of catching up to do but I will get there eventually. I activated all plugins I needed and deleted all the ones I actually don’t need any more. So this whole down time had a positive thing, too. Regarding the file “wp-cron.php”, I haven’t enabled since and I don’t think it is a good idea to do because I am convinced it will slow everything down again. Reading this up online this file lets you back up your database, email and schedule posts. I rarely schedule posts so I don’t think I miss out on anything by leaving this disabled. If there is anything more to this file, please let me know in the comments below.

What a story, right? Have you ever experienced something similar with your blog?