Hi,
We have the Newsmag 5.2.1 WP theme installed on washingtonthoroughbred.com. We host with Bluehost (VPS for Business).
Recently (August 23) we experienced extreme slowness and intermittent “internal server error” messages showing a white screen when trying to update/add posts. The site was not accessible to most people who tried to access it (it just wouldn’t load or was extremely slow causing people to hit the “refresh” button multiple times in an attempt to pull up the website). During this time we had a surge in traffic due to an online bidding event (Google Analytics puts us at 2,974 page views for the day… daily page views are normally around 200-600). In the past, we’ve successfully had page views of 4,485 in one day (August 21, 2018) and the site remained operational. In the last two years (August 2021 and 2022), we’ve experienced these types of issues––that is, during traffic surges.
Bluehost claims there is a problem with our themes, plug-ins, etc. and that it is not due to the hosting plan. There was only one plug-in that needed updating at the time (UpdraftPlus).
Here is the PHP info for our website: https://washingtonthoroughbred.com/info.php
On the theme’s system status screen, I discovered two warnings today:
– PHP Execution Time = 30 (tagDiv recommends 60 or more)
– PHP Max Input Vars = 1000 (tagDiv recommends 2000 or more)
Once traffic died down, the site was reachable more consistently and we were able to resume with adding/updating posts.
On another note: We use Bluehost’s email servers and we were also unable to send email during the surge in traffic.
Has anyone else using the Newsmag theme run into this type of issue? From a theme builder’s perspective, what recommendations do you have for us moving forward? Can you recommend a way to give the site a stress test to reproduce the problem?
I do have a staging site set up at Blogvault:
https://washingtonthoroughbred218.e.wpstage.net/
Usr: blogvault
Pwd: 0e3fff7e
Staging SFTP and PHPMyAdmin access is available on request.
Much appreciated, and please let me know if I can provide more details.
Thanks,
Venessa Koehn
If it helps, I have run a bandwidth usage report from Bluehost for August 1-26, 2022. View here: https://acrobat.adobe.com/link/review?uri=urn:aaid:scds:US:97664fc6-e2f9-39a7-a399-9ae5f1702cd4
Hi,
I would like to check the main website. Something must be wrong if the website goes offline, I will check the error logs and also increase those parameters you mention, maybe the wp-memory as well if needed. Please send us an email at contact@tagdiv.com and there provide access to the main website, also to Bluehost.
Thank you!
Just sent you the credentials Simion. Thanks!
