Question

my web server stopped working

It was running for several years and it is not no longer working. Do you know what is going on? Can you please take a look.


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alexdo
Site Moderator
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August 31, 2023

I can suggest some common things to check when you’re experiencing issues:

1. Check your droplet’s CPU and memory usage, it might be running into resources issues. 2. Inspect your disk space for any signs of being overloaded. 3. Review your system and application logs for any errors. 4. Make sure your system is updated and properly configured.

For more detailed troubleshooting steps, please refer to this

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-troubleshoot-common-site-issues-on-a-linux-server

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-monitor-cpu-use-on-digitalocean-droplets

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-top-netstat-du-other-tools-to-monitor-server-resources

Regards

KFSys
Site Moderator
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August 17, 2023

Heya,

Can you share the exact error you see? Are you using Apache or Nginx, what is the error, do you see the service as failed or do you see the issue on your website?

Bobby Iliev
Site Moderator
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August 16, 2023

Hi there,

I would recommend following these steps in case that you are having any problems with your nginx server and you are unsure on what the problem is:

  • Check if nginx is running:
systemctl status nginx

If nginx is running you should see something like this:

● nginx.service - The nginx HTTP Server
   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/nginx.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: active (running) since Tue 2019-11-19 09:37:46 UTC; 2 days ago
     Docs: https://httpd.nginx.org/docs/2.4/

If nginx is not running then the output would look like this:

● nginx.service - The nginx HTTP Server
   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/nginx.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: inactive (dead) since Fri 2019-11-22 08:41:01 UTC; 39s ago
     Docs: https://httpd.nginx.org/docs/2.4/
  • If nginx is not running you could start it with:
systemctl start nginx

Then check the status agian and make sure that nginx remains running.

  • If nginx did not start after a reboot, you could enable it so that it starts after the next reboot:
systemctl enable nginx
  • Check your nginx config syntax:
nginx -t

If you get an error, you would need to fix that problem and then you could restart nginx:

systemctl restart nginx
  • If you get Syntax OK when running nginx -t then your confiruation is correct, so I would recommend checking your error logs:
tail -f /var/log/nginx/error.log
  • Check the permissions of the files and folders in your document root:

Find the user that your nginx service is running as:

ps auxf | grep nginx

If you are using Ubuntu, the user should be www-data, so you would need to make sure that your files and folders are owned by that user, so nginx could read and write to those files:

chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/yourdomain.com
  • Check if nginx is binding to the default ports:
netstat -plant | grep '80\|443'
  • Check if ufw allows TCP connections on port 80 and 443:
ufw status

If this is the case, you can follow the steps from this article here on how to configure your ufw:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-a-firewall-with-ufw-on-ubuntu-18-04

That is pretty much it, with all of the above information you should be able to narrow down the problem.

For more information I would suggest checking out this article here:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-troubleshoot-common-site-issues-on-a-linux-server

Here is also a quick video demo on how to do that:

You can also consider upgrading to a larger server so that you could have more resources to handle your load if it has increased over the years.

Hope that this helps!

Regards,

Bobby

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