Subdomain offline

I've been reading some of the recent outage messages and I don't believe I have a similar issue.

One of my subdomains has been failing to respond to web requests for the last six hours or so.

It doesn't seem to be similar to the titanic (*cough* *cough*) issue. I can FTP in and see everything.

It's certainly not a WordPress issue (not a blog).

Minor changes to htaccess made a few days ago have been removed (the remainder of the file is pretty innocuous).


The error logs seem to show a couple score of entries marked 'Premature end of script headers: /dh/cgi-system/php.cgi', but that doesn't strike me as very many.

There's a six hour gap in my access log followed by about 15 minutes of low-activity, then nothing else.


Any idea what would take down just one subdomain?

Thanks.

-JPB

What did you see when you accessed your subdomain?

I has a similar problem before. My domain was reachable but I saw a blank page. That was because Apache server was restarting.

I get a blank page in Firefox, 'Cannot display page' in IE.

No source for the blank Firefox page.

No server-based error codes: nothing.

And it's only three or so sub domains out of a dozen or so.

If it's Apache restarting, then it's been trying to do so for most of the last 8 hours.

I was using Firefox and saw a blank page. I did not try with IE.

I sent a ticket to DH support and they replied in few hours (while my site were already up). They said that was due to apache restart. It seems I had better luck.

I've already fired off a note to Support. No response yet.

Not sure how snappy they'll be given the long weekend.


As for using Firefox, the browser indicates that I'm getting a '200 OK' header response.

Nothing else. No date, server identifier, content type, content length... just '200 OK'

What's the URL?

And there's the ol' refresh trick of going into the Manage Domains panel and click Edit on your domain then the "Change Fully Hosted Domain Settings Now" button to refresh the hosting.


-Scott

I can't say I'm familiar with that one.

I'm getting the same lack of response from at least three of my sub domains. Others respond fine.

The primary sub domain of interest is: http://jiltanith.thefifthimperium.com/

-Joe

Give that Refresh a try and see if that helps.

-Scott

Your case is similar to mine. My account has two domains. One was working. The other was down likes yours (blank page). No errors in log either.

Something must be done to get Apache back to work!

Thanks.

It took me a few moments to realize what you were talking about.

Either Support did something in the weeds on my account, or the update got it back online.

This happens sometimes. On every server at DH there are several independent Apache (Webserver) instances running. Each of your subdomains could be hosted on a different instance or several subdomains could be running on the same instance of the webserver. I think the assignment to one or the other Apache instance it pretty random. Anyway.... sometime one of those Apache instances crashes while the or still working. This leads to what you are seeing, one subdomains is down while the other subdomains are working. Normally this is resolved pretty quickly, but in your case you might call supports attention to it.

Jan

I heard back from Support and they said pretty much the same thing.

They restarted the server instance.

It *seems* that the 'change configuration' trick brought it up at the time - probably by initiating a restart of the instance with the 'new' configuration - but I've also had a few brief drop outs over the course of the night.

Not optimum, but better than getting nothing from the server.

-Joe

I am having the same problem with one of my subdomains, curiously just one. It does not respond, not even using wget inside my SSH account. After 20-30 minutes it is back online.

wget says:
HTTP request sent, awaiting response...
Read error (Connection reset by peer) in headers.
Retrying.

Is there any word on what could be causing this?
I'll try deleting the whole subdomain and dir and recreating it and see...

No! Don't delete anything! Just wait and if it takes to long send support a message, they just need to restart the Apache (webserver) instance for the subdomain - as I said above. This happens sometimes ....

Jan

Its no problem, I am re-creating the site now.
Unfortunately, "This happens sometimes...." does not seem to fit in this case. The subdomain was down 4 times (that I know of) in less than 2 weeks, while the others were working.
If it happens from time to time, well thats the cost of hosting the site in someone else's server, but a single subdomain suffering from the same problem again and again... its just annoying.

I've also had that for a while, if a subdomain was down it was always just one and always the same one - but also that has passed. I don't know how DH handles restarting the Apache instances, i.e. if it happens 'automagicly' or if DH staff is notified and then they restart the crashed process. If it is all done by some scripts DH might not be aware of this happening all the time, maybe there is an abusive user on that same specific Apache instance causing it to crash all the time. You might want to contact support about it.

Jan

Damn, down again. Another subdomain is saying "Connection refused".
Lets see what support says...