Last Updated on July 12, 2021 by Christopher G Mendla
One of my WordPress sites started acting up. When I tried to create a post, it would hang on saving and push the shared hosting CPU, IO operations and Entry Process past the hosting limits. That would crash the front and back ends of all of my sites
The Problem
I have about six sites on a shared hosting plan. They are sites I’m trying to incubate. Put another way, they aren’t making much money yet so I’m trying to be as cheap as possible. The host has limits which, if exceeded, cause a resources exceeded error.
At one time, the hosting company had excellent US based tech support. Problems were almost always resolved with one call 24 hours a day. They have since been sold and resold. The new company is overseas. They are not offering telephone support ‘due to covid’. The chat support is OK but it can take a while to get an issue resolved.
I am in the process of moving the more productive sites to another host. However, I was still stuck with a cumbersome process to resolve issues. One site in particular was crashing every time I tried to add a post. This was caused by runaway processes from a misbehaving plugin. This would bring all of the sites to a halt until the hosting support killed the errant processes
I was getting a JSON error and the site wasn’t saved.
Since the hosting is shared hosting and not a VPS, I don’t have an option to reboot the server.
An alternative to contacting support
There is a way to resolve the issue by temporarily renaming the site folder. This should cause the site to ‘disconnect’ from the hosting. When you name it back to the original folder name, it ‘reconnects’
As always, you should have complete backups and your backup/recovery plan should be thoroughly tested.
I have my sites in a folder called ‘sites’ under my public_html. If you FTP to the hosting, you can see the folders for the various sites.
You need to locate the folder for the site with the runaway processes. Once you find that, rename it by adding an ‘.xxx’ to the end.
When you do that, your server should calm down in a minute or two.
Use the same trick to disable plugins
If you suspect one or more plugins to be the source of your server going crazy, you can disable the plugins by adding a .xxx to them. You should make a note and either delete them or rename them back to their original name once you resolve the issue.
Summary
This trick allows me to quickly disable a site, fix the issues, and re-enable it without a need to go through a sometimes lengthy chat process or creating a ’24 hour’ ticket.