Finally, the blog is back online…

Gwyn in DespairMy deep apologies for the past week without access to my blog. It was a true nightmare figuring out what was wrong, and neither me nor the DreamHost technical support managed to fully understand what was wrong. In utter despair, I’ve even moved the whole installation to another server (one that is not currently being used for much) to see if I could temporarily redirect the blog there.

What was my surprise, after several hours of patiently configuring everything and uploading the backup, to find out that it behaved exactly like the site hosted by Dreamhost! Something very strange was going on, and there was only a way to try it out: remove all WordPress plugins and start from scratch.

Well, your surprise will not be bigger than mine to find out that basically removing them and adding them again, one by one, seemed to have fixed the issue! I believe that at some point I was hitting somewhere on a WordPress bug, which is tied up with a lot of things — memory allocation and waiting for MySQL to reply. Somehow, this bug is rather hard to reproduce. Worse than that — the strange combination that makes all the site unresponsive affects the backoffice as well! Everything stops — site, backoffice, PHP for all sites sharing this user, and MySQL — and there seems to be nothing that helps! Except, fortunately, removing all plugins and starting from scratch…

Ah well — with luck, there won’t be any more hiccups 🙂

Cheers to all who sent me words of encouragement and wishes of good luck; I do appreciate your support!

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