A Little Downtime

Experienced a little downtime earlier today. I don’t know if you noticed it, but this blog was totally inaccessible. I was trying out a new plugin and fixing my links page when I noticed that my useronline plugin was showing errors on my sidebar. Next was an error showing up in my Dashboard. Then all of a sudden I couldn’t open my blog anymore. If I tried to log-in or access the blog’s main URL, my browser would try to open or download the PHP files instead of running them.

I was worried. I didn’t know exactly what was causing the problem. I immediately checked my web host’s server status but everything was okay. It could be the newly installed plugin but I couldn’t go in and deactivate it because as I mentioned earlier, I couldn’t log-in to my WP Dashboard.

I was able to log-in to my FTP and CPanel without any problems. The next thing I did was to do a backup of my WordPress database just in case.

I left a message in my web host’s support forums and also sent a private message to the guy who was managing the servers, letting him know bout the problems I was experiencing.

In a few minutes time, I got a reply from him and saying that all issues have been resolved and everything should be back to normal. I was relieved! I was so happy because I thought I lost my blog again and would have to reinstall everything and start from scratch.

I learned one important thing in this experience. Aside from having a backup of your files and database. If you encounter the same problem, if you try to login or access your blog’s URL and the PHP files are being opened or downloaded by your browser, make sure that you make a backup of your wp-config.php file and delete the one from your web directory. You don’t want anybody to just download it and get all the important data in that file. Thanks to Kristin for pointing that out. She tried to help me figure out the problem but it was out of our hands. Turns out, the problem was with the Apache server and only my web host admin could fix it.

In case of another downtime and you can’t access this blog, you can go to my WordPress.com account which is my temporary blog and where I post any problems I have with this blog.

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5 Comments

  1. @Jam – You're welcome! Just trying to share what I learned and hopefully others would learn from it and find it helpful. :)

    @ade – Yeah, everything's back to normal now. :D

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