Get to the Bottom of It

In late August I was doing a training for some of our staff when I went to pull up a page on our website. Our normally speedy WordPress site was unusually sluggish, which always makes for an awkward pause in the middle of a presentation. Eventually, the page loaded and I went about my business not paying much mind to it.

A couple days later I had a report from one of our schools that their website was also loading slowly. After doing a little digging I noticed that all sites on our VPS (Virtual Private Server) were intermittently loading slowly or timing out. I began running a ping to our server and noticed that it would drop offline at random intervals. “No big deal,” I thought to myself, as I quickly remoted into the server to give it a reboot. We have had our BlueHost VPS for years, and it’s always just worked. The server rebooted and things seemed better initially, but the problem quickly reappeared.

Thinking the problem was surely some WordPress plugin gone awry, I began the process of disabling plugins one-by-one, then waiting a minute or two to see if the problem reappeared. Much to my chagrin, I could not find a plugin causing this issue. I then began running WordPress in debug mode to see if I could get to the bottom of things. This sent me down numerous rabbit holes, none of which resolved the issue.

Frustrated, I finally gave in and called tech support. They were happy to assist me, but quickly realized that I had already exhausted all of the usual suspects. A level two engineer joined the call and quickly pointed the finger at one particular WordPress plugin. I waited until off hours to fully disable the plugin and even contacted the developer to report the findings of the engineer. Lo and behold, this did not fix the issue either.

After getting back in touch with support, they said that the problem had to be with one of my sites, and that I should go through and begin disabling them until I find the culprit. I relayed to them how difficult this is when you have a multi-network WordPress installation. They insisted that was the problem, so I begrudgingly complied. That weekend I decided to take a more drastic approach and moved all of my websites into a quarantine folder, inaccessible by the web server altogether. Within minutes the VPS was still losing connection, so I knew the issue was not with any of my sites. I quickly fired off an email to update the ticket with my findings and requested that they move my account to a different server.

Days went by with no reply. My frustration grew as the issue became more prominent. I sent more ticket updates as I thought of anything else to try. I got passed to different engineers, who all found something the other had missed, but the problem persisted. I was ready to jump ship from BlueHost, already researching other VPS providers. Finally, after more than two weeks, I get an email update from an engineer saying they found a bad stick of RAM in the host server, and that I should be good to go. And that’s all it was. A bad stick of memory that is now forever stuck in my memory.