Question

Entire Droplet won't load any websites:

Posted on January 2, 2024
DigitalOcean Droplets
Asked by b57a0bf4796d4f7abf500ecf69cc41

Crazy story. I have a few low-traffic websites I have on a droplet.

manknownaspaul.com wisewings.ca lifecraft.me etc

and some development environments on subdomains.

but this morning, I wake up and to my dismay, not a single website is viewable.

DNS settings check out.

I am only at an elementary level with the terminal.

Where do I start to look for answers?

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Bobby Iliev

Site Moderator

• January 2, 2024

Hi there,

I’ve just visited your sites and I can see that they are returning a 500 error. The 500 error typically indicates a server-side problem, so let’s approach this step by step.

Check Server Logs: The first step is to check your server logs for any specific error messages. Since you’re at an elementary level with the terminal, here’s a simple command to view the last few lines of your web server’s error log. For Apache, use sudo tail -30 /var/log/apache2/error.log, and for Nginx, use sudo tail -30 /var/log/nginx/error.log. This might give you a clue about what’s going wrong.
Server Resources: Sometimes, 500 errors can be due to resource exhaustion. Check if your Droplet is running out of memory or CPU. You can quickly check this with the top command.
File Permissions: Incorrect file permissions can also cause such issues. Ensure that your web files have the correct permissions set. A general rule of thumb is directories should be 755 and files should be 644.
PHP/Database Issues: If your site is PHP-based (like WordPress), check the PHP error logs. You might also want to verify that your database is up and running correctly with systemctl status mysql or systemctl status postgresql, depending on your database system.
Restart Web Server: After checking the above, try restarting your web server. For Apache, use sudo systemctl restart apache2, and for Nginx, use sudo systemctl restart nginx.