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Question about problem I'm having with website

by Grega123
3 replies
Hello,

I have one question, which does deal with SEO in someway, but mostly about hosting. I don't know where to ask this question so I'm sorry if I picked the wrong subforum.

Anyway, I have a website hosted on Bluehost (pro plan - best hosting plan). It mostly just a blog, I write posts and publish them. Currently I have around 80 posts published.

Anyway what is happening to me is really annoying and I am thinking about changing the hosting company (probably SiteGround, Idk).

The problem I'm having is like this:
  • Every couple of months (like once per 2-3 months) my site starts to work really slow, like 15-20 seconds loading time. While normally it loads around 1.5 sec.
  • When it starts working slow, it also becomes not-responding (I click something and nothing happens).
  • It is also very common, that instead of page being loaded I get an error (something like: ERR_CONNECTION_FAILED)
  • This happens randomly, when I am not doing anything on the website (not publishing, not installing plugins, or doing anything at all). I go to sleep my site works great, I wake up and it's corrupted.

I always do the same, after this happens, I go to live chat and try talking to technical support.
They tell me to switch browser, clear cache, etc. Of course nothing helps.
They always promise that it will be fixed in an hour or two, but it's not.
Sometimes they say there's problem with my SSL certificate, they reinstall it, but it doesn't fix.
The last time they fixed it for me, the guy said something like he reinstalled my httaccess file - after he did this, the site began to work actually.

Anyway, after 2-3 days, somehow the site starts to work again, becomes fast and responds, without any errors. I never know if it's because of something they did (fix) or is it just random.

I do not have any programing skills. I never touch or install stuff to my site.
All I do, is write posts (add content) to my site.

My question here is: is there something on their end that is wrong, or am I doing something wrong?
Will changing the host help me, or do you think something else should be done to avoid further problems?

Thanks for all the answers.
#problem #question #website
  • Profile picture of the author wzeitler
    There are so many links in the chain, some of them can only be checked by looking at server logs, etc., unfortunately.

    What you might try is an online tool like this:

    https://tools.pingdom.com/

    Basically it measures how long it takes for your site to respond to pingdom.com saying 'hello' to your site. Get some numbers when it's running OK, then compare them with numbers when it's not. This would give you metrics that have nothing to do with your browser/cache/etc. So if you get terrible numbers with pingdom.com when your server is slow, you can be confident it has nothing to do with your browser, etc. This would at least narrow things down to which haystack!
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  • Profile picture of the author Mark Singletary
    It's hard to say who is at fault since even when we are not actually doing anything, plugins and WP are still working in the background.

    They shouldn't tell you they'll fix it if it's not their fault but that's probably more of a customer service (or lack of) issue. In other words it may be your fault but they say they'll fix it knowing it will go away for another couple of months or whatever.

    Do you have a lot of traffic?

    What plugins are you using?

    Have you been hacked?

    Lots of questions need definite answers before anyone can answer yours.

    Mark
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  • Profile picture of the author Alfredo Oyanadel
    So there are a lot of things that could be happening here, it could be something on your own WP installation that clogs the system. And the generic response might not be very helpful from customer service. But 2-3 days to then suddenly work is suspicion.

    My suggestion given that it's a single WP installation..

    I'd:

    1. Move to my my own AWS EC2 instance, with auto scaling. Perhaps a Cloudfront if you have heavy assets and some other suitable things depending on what you have.
    (This does require fundamental AWS services knowledge to setup and from there the guesstimate would be around $20-30/month)

    2. Move to a new host (look around and test them out).


    tldr
    You might have an issue with performance durin peak, which would make your code responsible for the outage.

    I wouldn't trust the customer service. At best I'm guessing they are only checking that they are not being DDOS:ed
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