Happy New Year!

Happy New Year 2

dgdg

If you get to read this, you’re one of the lucky ones.

Here’s the timeline so far.


On Dec. 7th Godaddy automatically updated my Managed WordPress site, www.OurRVAdventures.com, to WP 5.0, with no resulting problems.

On Dec. 22nd at 1:59am Godaddy updated my site with WP 5.0.2.

Later on the 22nd, Uptime Robot showed my site down from 1:18pm to 1:21pm.

Then, starting at 5:32am on the 23rd my site was down for 28 minutes.

And that seems to have unleashed the floodgates.

Since then my site has been down and up almost 300 times, sometimes for just a few minutes, and sometimes for 20 to 30 minutes.  

It’s not just me. Blog readers all over the country are seeing the problem.

When you try to access the site you either get:

The connection was reset.
ERR_CONNECTION_RESET

or

ourrvadventures.com took too long to respond.
ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT

There are no other errors shown, 500 series or otherwise.

When I first called Godaddy Support on the night of the 23rd, they couldn’t see the problem. After a lot of back and forth I figured out Godaddy Support is not looking at their sites from the ‘outside’ so to speak, but apparently on some sort of internal direct line.

However they could see the problem looking at ShotSherpa.com or Geopeeker.com.

At that point the tech went off for about 5 minutes and came back to tell me it was a server problem and they were ‘working on it’.

When I called back on the morning of the 24th, still ‘working on it’.

Didn’t even bother calling on the 25th.

I called back again on the evening of the 26th and was on the phone for almost 90 minutes. As before, every time I called I have to basically start over again, even though I referenced previous calls.

This time, after a lot more back and forth, and going to talk with other techs, I was told the server was ‘under mitigation’, whatever  that means. Even the tech wasn’t sure. He thought maybe it meant the server was under a DOS attack.

Deciding to try the day shift capabilities, I called Godaddy today, the 28th. And it was back to square one. Finally after about 45 minutes of the tech going off for 5 minutes at a time, he came back with the solution to the problem.

My Managed WordPress blog was suddenly ‘out of date’. I was told it was my plug-ins were out of date, my Javascript was out-of-date, and my PHP was out of date. I was told my site was slow and bogged down.

First off, I update my plug-ins as soon as I get a notice. And site is not slow. Even now, when it’s working for a few minutes and I hit Refresh, the site loads right up with no problems. It either works fine, or not at all.

When I asked why my site was suddenly ‘out of date’ as of 5:32am on December 23rd, I got no answer. But was told again that this was the problem.

Unfortunately I forgot to mention to the Tech that if my ‘out-dated’ site was the problem,  then why didn’t they see the problem internally.

Then came the kicker. For $100 worth of WP Premium Support – Deluxe support they would guarantee to fix the site.

I was also told that since I didn’t have Godaddy Website Security, at $250/year, I was probably also highly infected with malware, adware, Trojan’s, etc. When I said I had Jetpack for that, he said that didn’t come with Jetpack, I  told him it did with Jetpack Premium, which is what I have. Again, no more about that.

In addition, when the site is not working, it cannot be pinged. Nor can I SFTP in using FileZilla.

Also, when I’m logged into Godaddy and go to my Managed WP area in My Products, and click on the blue WP Admin button, nothing happens. But then if I try it 30 seconds later, it may work fine and I’m in the Dashboard. But then 30 more seconds later, and I click on something like My Posts, I get nothing, just the whirling circle.

Just another datapoint.

After trying for about 30 minutes I finally got into my WP blog’s Dashboard for a couple of minutes, and as a test, was able to deactivate all my plug-ins.

And as I expected, this made no difference in the up/down situation on my blog.

And since the blog went back down again before I could reactivate the plug-ins after the test, I spent another 15 minutes getting back in to reactivate things.

But you can be sure that Godaddy is still ‘working on it’.

So stay tuned, and keep checking back.

HappyNewYear