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 […]
Cloudflare Caching and vCanopy
TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction Cloudflare’s Free Plugin Cloudflare’s Free CDN Caching and vCanopy How to Check if Your Website is Being Served by Cloudflare How to Check the Caching Status of Your Website Purging the Cloudflare Cache Further Reading Introduction Cloudflare’s free tier is extremely popular within the vCanopy community, and for good reason. One […]
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 […]
WordPress Performance: Common Questions and Answers
Introduction The contents of this article started from a post in our Facebook group with some misunderstandings there are when it comes to “tuning” your server settings for performance. That post resulted in this post in our Community Forum, and this article is essentially the contents of that post made public. TABLE OF CONTENTS Improving Performance at a […]
How to Block Bad Bots from Your Sites/Servers
Introduction Bad bot traffic can be a huge resource hog on your servers, and some are outright malicious. They offer no value to you or your clients, and can sometimes result such high resource usage that it becomes the equivalent of a DoS attack. Fortunately, if you’ve identified a bot (by it’s user agent) that’s […]
Using the PHP Slow Log
Introduction PHP slow logging can be an extremely useful debugging tool for tracking down long-running requests that can lead to performance bottlenecks for your WordPress websites. By identifying the specific requests that are running slow, you can set about either fixing the code itself or replacing the plugin responsible for the bottleneck (it’s almost always […]