Sites up and down Intermittently with 'No data received' Error code: ERR_EMPTY_RESPONSE
I'm not very technical so apologies up front! Unfortunately, I've been left to figure this out though as the company who deal with my dedicated server are being less than helpful.
Really hoping someone can shed some light on this. We host around 100 websites and currently, all sites on our server are up and down like yoyos. There doesn't seem to be a pattern - it's very sporadic and intermittent. Usually, you can just click around one of the sites, for example www.innivo.com for a few mins and you’ll see the site drop out, and then after a few refreshes, it will come back, then back down – you get the idea.
In Chrome, I get: No data received
Unable to load the web page because the server sent no data.
Error code: ERR_EMPTY_RESPONSE
In Firefox I get: The connection was reset
The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading.
The site could be temporarily unavailable or too busy. Try again in a few moments. If you are unable to load any pages, check your computer's network connection. If your computer or network is protected by a firewall or proxy, make sure that Firefox is permitted to access the Web.
The server doesn’t go down completely, it just doesn’t seem to serve the page. This also agrees with the firewall theory I mentioned on the call.
We have paid a lot of money to a security company who have removed a few bits of malware in the hope that it would fix the problem, but they now say that the server is completely clean and exploit free. My service provider is saying they won't help until I upgrade PHP on the server but although I'm going to do this, I'm pretty sure that this won't fix the sites dropping out all the time.
I found this post which describes EXACTLY what is happening, but he doesn’t really say how to fix it, or even if his ever got fixed but it’s the closest thing I’ve found! http://progblog10.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/modsecurity-causes-sporadic-no-data.html
I looked for this on the server but mod_security didn’t seem to exist otherwise I would have tried to disable it to see if it made a difference. I think though, that this firewall theory sounds plausible. I wonder if we have some other type of firewall which was maybe activated or updated when we updated CPanel last week.
I'm running WHM / CPanel / Apache
Any help would be massively appreciated. Hoping that this has happened to someone else!
Answer
My personal experience. I have xplornet. I was unable to access a local site with none of my browsers. I have my computer, my Hughes, my printer, my monitor all plugged into a power bar. I shut off the computer, Unplugged everything including the plug in on the back of the hughes. Left it for a few minutes then plugged everything back in into different outlets on the power bar. I was able to access the site after that. Why I have no idea but it worked.