What's draining the resources

[justintime]

We have a wordpress optimised managed cloud server from 20i which is 2 core cpu, 4 gig ram, 80 gig hard drive and 4 tb bandwidth. We have had a lot of problems with the site crashing, and 20i are telling us that it's a memory/cpu problem. The web developer who set it up has had a look and tweaked or removed certain plug ins, but the site has crashed again this morning and 20i are advising an upgrade to the next level, which is 4 core cpu but also double the price. One of the websites is a woocommerce shopping site which at it's peak got approx 1400 hits at 12pm today (roughly when it crashed) and a website where people can book courses, which at 12pm had about 2000 hits. I wouldn't have thought 3400 hits would cause it to crash on that spec server but I could be wrong. Does anyone have any suggestions as to what we do next. I'm reluctant to upgrade but if that's the answer fair enough.

 

[ServWise]

A lot of what you think is traffic is actually spambots and hacking scripts trying break into your site or the huge number of bots scaping content which has exploded with addition of AI learning systems.

You could look into blocking these bad bots at your firewall (You can find bad bot lists online) which would likely help a lot.

Also add a WP firewall like Wordfence if you dont already which has some built in capability to block this sort of stuff but is not as good as a backend-based firewall.

 

[fisicx]

You can do an awful lot at server level to block bots and spammers.

Try moving back to a racked server as the cloudy server could well be somewhere overseas. It shouldn’t be but 20i could well be pulling a fast one.

I’ve got a server with around 40 wp sites all chugging away and never had a crash despite thousands of bots all hammering wash trying to breaking.

 

[ukwebhosting]

Hi

For the hits if they all came at once it would eat your server alive.

Ask your host to have a look at the access logs to see if they can identify where that traffic was coming from.

For example is it coming from a few IPs then ask them to block them or if it’s a subnet that belongs to a server host consider blocking the whole subnet as consumers don’t tend to come from hosted servers.

Also ask them to look at the user agents are there common ones etc and have they come in a lot at a time.

Your looking for user agents like crawlers there.

Also is a lot of that traffic going to urls that do not exist and looks like attempts to inject into mysql etc

There is a lot your host should be doing for you before jumping to upgrade as if what you described is right with that amount doubling wouldn’t even come close either!

Go back to them and ask for their help, it’s a managed server so they should be helping you especially as it would appear to be malicious traffic.

 

[ukwebhosting]

If your system normally runs absolutely fine then you likely have a problem with some malicious traffic.

That traffic is 99/100 not personal so would turn up whatever you run.

So don't jump out of the frying pan into the fire.

Speak to your host.

 

[Dave SEO]

If you have not already, move your DNS to Cloudflare, as this can mitigate the bot traffic. There is a free option, so you can give it a try.

You could also try a WP memory plugin to get some idea of what resource is being used.

If you are in the £40+ per month range price-wise for your hosting, it should be able to handle the traffic you have mentioned with no problems.

 

[fisicx]

posts promoting one platform over another have been deleted. Please stay on topic.

 

[antropy]

posts promoting one platform over another have been deleted. Please stay on topic.

It was on topic. The problem was caused by using a platform that can't handle the load.

If moderators in this forum continue to delete my posts I will cancel my membership and leave.

Paul.

 

[fisicx]

It was on topic. The problem was caused by using a platform that can't handle the load.

No it wasn’t. Wordpress can handle the load, it’s the server that crashed - probably because of a spike in traffic.

 

[Shopclicks]

We have a wordpress optimised managed cloud server from 20i which is 2 core cpu, 4 gig ram, 80 gig hard drive and 4 tb bandwidth. We have had a lot of problems with the site crashing, and 20i are telling us that it's a memory/cpu problem.

You should have a look at migrating the site to a better hosting company with better resource allowances.

Take a look at the Emerald plan with Krystal Hosting:

Unlimited PCI Compliant Business Hosting based in the UK | Krystal Hosting

Need secure, stable, PCI compliant hosting? Our business plans protect your customers’ data & are on our lightning-fast servers.

krystal.io

 

[AlanJ1]

It was on topic. The problem was caused by using a platform that can't handle the load.

No it wasn't on topic, and no it isn't the platform.

 

[antropy]

Ok well I've given my advice based on my 20+ years experience, I'll leave it there.

Paul.

 

[williamjameswr]

If you have not already, move your DNS to Cloudflare, as this can mitigate the bot traffic. There is a free option, so you can give it a try.

This is the best advice you'll get

 

[Samian]

Similar issues so we added cloud flare free option which allowed us to block traffic from certain countries and stopped a huge amount of spammy traffic, further investigation revealed a plugin that had been added at some point and had made a huge number of unnecessary backups in addition to our daily hosting backups, removing them freed up a lot of space and no need to increase hosting size/costs. Plenty of people on PPH that can give you advice but check their reviews/reputation