Fixing Better Uptime False Alarms

INFO While this article is for troubleshooting Better Uptime, the advice below may also apply to other uptime monitoring solutions as most have similar feature sets. Better Uptime is a popular uptime monitoring service within the vCanopy community. Both ourselves, many of our team members, and many of our clients bought the excellent Appsumo deal […]

Diagnosing HTTP 500 / Internal Server Errors

TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction Quick Checks PHP Service Checks Codebase Checks: PHP and WordPress OpenLiteSpeed Specific Checks Database Checks Introduction 500 errors can be caused by a variety of different factors, but by far the most common reason is errors within the codebase of your website. There’s usually either a fatal error due to a […]

What are those weird extra sites inside /var/www?

A fairly common question we get asked is “What are those two weird-looking sites on my server?” Inside your servers /var/www directory, you can list all of your websites with: ls -l Here you’ll find two websites with a random set of letters and numbers as the subdomain of vCanopyvps.com, for example: 22222 gy96dzepe0.vCanopyvps.comgy96dzepe0stat.vCanopyvps.com These two sites, plus […]

Sites are Down! Part 1: Here’s What Everyone Needs to Know

Introduction If your websites have been running smoothly for more than a few days, the chances of them running into a serious issue or “going down” is incredibly rare. However, a few key pieces of information can be incredibly empowering for if things do ever go wrong If you’re using best practices and you use your […]

Sites are Down! Part 2: Practical Troubleshooting

TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction Quick First Checks Services are down (MySQL, PHP, Nginx, OLS) Checking the Logs Critical Errors / 500 Errors Check top / htop for Load and CPU Steal MySQL/Database Checks Freeing Up Disk Space Server is Overloaded You’ve Been Hacked Introduction In part 1 of this article we took a broad look […]

Getting Started: Choosing Your First Servers and Common Server Questions

Introduction When first getting started managing your own servers an entire world of new, incredibly cost-effective options are now open to you. This can be a little overwhelming in the beginning, and some of the common questions that you may yourself have as well include: Which provider should you use? What server size should you […]