What to do if your Server is Down
What to do if your Server is Down
It's your worst nightmare, you can't get to your website, it's just not loading... here are a few tips we suggest to see if you can get it back up and running.
Let's try and identify if it's the website or is it the server that's having issues? Are the other sites on the server running, or do they have the same issue. If you log in to the platform what does the server dashboard show for CPU and memory usage, can you see any movement or traffic? Check your disk space, is it showing as red or looking very tight? Are you able to FTP to the server? If other sites are working and/or you can see there's movement in the CPU/memory usage it would indicate that the server is up but the site is down. If you can't FTP to it then that could suggest it's the server that's down.
If you're able to identify the issue is with the website then use this guide to troubleshoot.
So you've been able to identify the issue is with the server. How does the CPU usage look? If it's running constantly at 100% then use this guide to try and identify why.
Take a look at the disk space on the server dashboard, do you have plenty of room on there or is it looking very tight? Click on Disk Usage to get a more detailed look at what's using the space.
If the server has run out of disk space then the services running on it will be shutting down as there's not enough space on there for them to run. Obviously you need to try and clear some space! You're going to be restricted as to what you can do to reduce the space via the platform, in fact you won't be able to do anything as the platform won't be able to communicate with the server. You need to connect directly to the server, so find the FTP details (here's a guide for where to find them) or SSH details if you'd prefer (here's that guide). If you connect via FTP you're only going to be able to see/delete the website files, but maybe you know what's taking the space already and know what you can delete. If you connect via SSH then this command is handy to tell you what files/folders are using the most space
du -x / |sort -rnb |more
Take a look at what's in the results, is there anything that you know that you can clear, if so then do it. Once you've cleared some space I'd suggest rebooting the server, just to make sure all the services are up and running again.
You are able to restart several services through the platform, so if the issue is not disk or CPU related you could try restarting some of the services. From the server dashboard select Restart Services to show the different services you can restart through the platform, or you can reboot the server.
If the problem persists then it's time to get in contact, please raise a ticket with us so we can take a look.
Updated 4 months ago