Hello everybody,
I’m not sure how right I’m here of if you can help me – maybe I just need to rant… I have a pretty large WordPress installation on shared hosting, worked well/okay until about a month ago. Not the fastest, some quirks, but working. Now, it’s honestly impossible to work with, because there are errors all around. Error codes 524, timeouts… But, as you can imagine, two hours or half a day later everything works fine again.
Now I tried to find out why this all happens – and I’m on a dead end. Uninstalled/installed all plugins/themes, removed unnecessary and heavy plugins – everything worked, until the next day. I know that my cookie plugin (Real Cookie Banner from Devowl) is heavy stuff (Thanks to GDPR) but the first weeks of using it everything works well.
So, my thoughts are that it might also be a PHP/DB problem. I have PHP 8.3 and I’m not sure if all plugins are compatible (can’t downgrade lower than 8.1); and I have a MySQL 5.7 database from 2018.
Would updating the database help? What are your thoughts? Did you have anything similar?
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Since you cannot install any real tools on shared hosting itll be hard to debug, its best to get in touch with the host , it could be bad neighbor / bad hardware / some process stealing CPU .
On a VPS/server it would have been setup netdata and newrelic and should be good to go to dwell down into where the issue is coming from.
It can still be a lot of things, cronjobs/wp cron not triggering, or too much, database problems, some kind of misconfiguration, a plugin problem is also likely, there is a lot of options still possible… 524 is a specific cloudflare code, so a logical step would also be to check this code, and good steps are given here: [https://community.cloudflare.com/t/community-tip-fixing-error-524-a-timeout-occurred/42342?utm_source=localhost%3A8080](https://community.cloudflare.com/t/community-tip-fixing-error-524-a-timeout-occurred/42342?utm_source=localhost%3A8080)
Usually your shared server environment will have some resource usage page, and logs… This might help. If not, it might be best to start by contacting your host to see if they can point you in the right direction.
“Not the fastest, some quirks, but working.” doesn’t sound great either to be honest…
“Would updating the database help? ” This is not a good approach to fix things. 1. Find out what is wrong. 2. fix it.
Did you disable the WP-cron to run on every page load and configure it run via an actual cron job? If not, I would start there. Also, as the other said, read up on the CloudFlare 524 error.