kiwiphnx Posted May 10, 2018 Posted May 10, 2018 Username: kiwiphnxServer: tommyDomain: phoenixadvisergroup.nz As this is a business website, it is critical that we know the reason why our account has been suspended so we can reestablish our website as soon as possible. If this is due to resource usage; please be advised that we are in the process of transferring to paid hosting with another provider, but we will need (at minimum) FTP access to our account so we can pull the latest version of the website. If this is a suspected terms of service violation; what terms do you feel have been violated? Regards,Phoenix Adviser Group Ltd.
wolstech Posted May 10, 2018 Posted May 10, 2018 Your account was suspended for causing high server load. I have unsuspended your account, but please try to limit the load you put on our servers as it slows down not only your site, but the sites of all other HelioHost users sharing your server.If you still see the suspended page, please clear your cache.If you need help figuring out why your site is causing such high load let us know and we can try to help. If the high load is simply because your site is getting a lot of traffic you might consider trying paid hosting from our partner starting at only a cent for the first month. https://www.heliohost.org/partners/hostgator (Please note that it may take a few minutes for your account to completely unsuspend).
kiwiphnx Posted May 10, 2018 Author Posted May 10, 2018 Your account was suspended for causing high server load. I have unsuspended your account, but please try to limit the load you put on our servers as it slows down not only your site, but the sites of all other HelioHost users sharing your server. Thanks for the quick reply, wolstech. I am rather surprised to find that it is causing high load; if you can help us discover the reason why this is the case, it will perhaps help both of us. I will immediately begin the process of archiving the site for transfer to another provider. Cheers,AdministratorPhoenix Adviser Group Ltd.
kiwiphnx Posted May 10, 2018 Author Posted May 10, 2018 Quick question: One of the reasons we started looking for alternative hosting is because we have exhausted our storage quota. Do site backups created via cPanel count toward this limit; and, if so, is it possible to temporarily increase the quota so we can take a backup?If not, I will explore alternative ways to efficiently transfer the content offsite.
wolstech Posted May 11, 2018 Posted May 11, 2018 Your account will show as being way over quota when you make the backup, but should be fine as long as you download and delete the backup promptly. cPanel will allow you to exceed your quota to make a backup.
kiwiphnx Posted May 11, 2018 Author Posted May 11, 2018 I've retrieved and deleted the backup. Now if we can only figure out what is causing the account to generate such a high load. Were we the target of an attack; Is the WordPress caching not working properly; or is there perhaps an error in the .htaccess rules? I want to work with you to serve at least a static version of the website while I work to get the site live on our new host; the biggest problem I have right now (and, perhaps, this is the problem) is that the mod_rewrite ruleset in .htaccess has grown so complex (primarily as a result of having to host more than one web on the account) that I am not entirely sure I have a complete understanding of them anymore.
kiwiphnx Posted May 11, 2018 Author Posted May 11, 2018 I notice the account has become suspended again; so I can only guess something has happened quite recently to cause the unacceptably-high load (WordPress exploit or misbehaving plugin, perhaps?). Fortunately, I did have sufficient time to create and pull the backup, so the matter is now much less urgent. With your help, I would suggest we reset both the document root and .htaccess; and rebuild a static copy of the site using the contents of /www/static/uploads and /www/static/cache/cache-enabler/; as it will take me at least a few days to rebuild the site on the new host and we cannot afford to lose our web presence during that time. If you do find any insights into what has caused the unusual load, it would be greatly appreciated if you share them with me; as my strategy at present is to assume the site has been compromised and to rebuild it from scratch.
wolstech Posted May 11, 2018 Posted May 11, 2018 WordPress is famous for causing high load. To be honest, it's so full of bugs and security holes, and so poorly written that many of us are surprised it works at all. Then the extensions....that only make it worse. Caching plugins don't actually help in many cases because the content can be dynamic. We usually advise that people not use WP whenever possible. If you have to use it, your first step should be to remove most of the extensions... When i get to a pc, I'll rename index.php so,Wordpress won't run and unsuspend you again.
kiwiphnx Posted May 11, 2018 Author Posted May 11, 2018 Thanks again. The medium-term goal for us is to migrate the site to a better-suited CMS such as Concrete5 or Drupal; WordPress was never really intended to be a permanent solution. At this point, however, we have committed ourselves to migrating the website to paid hosting on a shared New Zealand-hosted VPS; so whatever we do now will only be a very short term solution (two weeks tops). I have already updated CloudFlare DNS to point the www and static subdomains to the new server, so that will only leave small stuff like the URL shortener and some mail forwarding rules. I apologise again for the load on your servers, whatever the root cause turns out to be; and Phoenix Adviser Group Ltd. thanks you for providing the service that you do.During Phoenix's time on Tommy, I have tried everything I can think of to tune performance (believe me, 10s+ page loading times are no fun for us either); including deploying CloudFlare CDN, agressively caching the HTML output from WordPress, and writing a very complex .htaccess ruleset to try to bypass WordPress for as many requests as possible. I have even suggested ways in which HeloiHost can increase the reliability and uptime of all your servers by, e.g. deploying a high-performance reverse proxy (e.g. Varnish) in front of them; potentially allowing Apache restarts to be overlapped (on different ports) on the backend. I think what HelioHost does is very noble, and I want you to be as successful as possible.
wolstech Posted May 11, 2018 Posted May 11, 2018 Concrete5 is actually a decent CMS from what I've seen. I've seen others using it here and it never causes load that I'm aware of. Usually when I find that CMS suspended, it's because of the content. I've renamed index.php and unsuspended you again. Please let us know if there's anything else you need help with.
kiwiphnx Posted May 12, 2018 Author Posted May 12, 2018 We scanned the site for malware and got it up again on the new host. Long story short, WordPress or one of its plugins may have broken itself on the last update. Although I haven't yet connected the database on the new host; loading the site from cache revealed that the WordFence firewall is generating a request of around 250 bytes with every mouse movement. Perhaps this is a contributing factor to the problem?
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