Evan
Wordpress / Divi / Avada / Oxygen
- Local time
- 11:52
- Joined
- Oct 5, 2019
- Messages
- 56
Within the past 2 days our server has been having some issues with server load. Accessing either the front or the back-end of any of our 200+ Wordpress sites typically results in a 503. There will be a few brief moments where server load is fine and everything works dandy, but it's usually overloaded.

We ran into this issue months ago and was resolved by simply moving our more higher-traffic websites to their own server. The results were immediate. I did note however that if we continued adding websites to the server (which we have), eventually we'll likely run into issues again (can't just keep cramming food down someone's throat and not expect issues at some point). This one felt different though, as it wasn't really a gradual server load increase over time, but rather sudden. I reached out to Siteground support to see if they could spot anything odd going on (our account doesn't have root access, so I can't really dig into things on my own unfortunately, and rely on support for the gritty details). They noted:
I noticed, however, many of your websites (I checked the ones consuming the most resources) are generating a lot of self-referring requests. The requests are coming from the server's IP, which means that you have self-referring scripts on your websites.
That was the most detail I got out of it. When I asked if I could see the full list of websites consuming the most resources, I was told to simply view the Account Stats tool in cPanel. With over 200 websites this isn't really feasible (well, it is, but very time consuming). Where do I even begin to look for these 'self-referencing scripts'? Is there a common culprit? Some broken HTTPs plugin? A malfunctioning security script? It's incredibly vague, and as someone who is primarily a web designer/developer and definitely not a server admin, it's stressing me out because I'm literally the only support guy at work in charge of these clients, and I know come Monday I'll be asked to fix it (on top of the other projects I'm currently tackling, which itself is overwhelming, but I digress). The little research I've done hasn't really turned up any useful results, though I was mainly looking for a Wordpress-related solution, which limited my results.
Fixing some plugin conflict on a single site is one thing, and something I run into from time to time. Along with occasional theme issues and what-not. Those I can handle. An entire server facing this kind of issue - is not. But I have to fix it. Somehow.
So, suggestions?
🦃