503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

[Scarface]

Hi everyone i normally don't post up my problems because i can normally fix them myself or figure it out! but recently (approx 4 days ago) i have been getting 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable error on and off sometimes the site is functioning perfectly and sometimes i try and open it and its completely dead i get a 503 error message and thats about all.

I was wondering if this can be caused because someone is DDosing my site? i am pretty sure its not the host because there are few other sites on same host and they are running perfectly. Since the site has been opened Dec 08 early January i have not had any trouble in fact the site has never once been down (only when we close it down via vBulletin options because of updates etc...).

The site has been coming online for a few hours then i try and access it and it gets me the 503 error. I was searching on Google and some sites suggested over flow of site traffic causes 503 errors but in the past iv been getting up to 300 guests online continuously (thanks to Katz and Phazeddl) and the site runs super smooth.

Anyway if someone could point me into the right direction it would be much appreciated.

Scarface Reviewed by Scarface on 31st May 2009. 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable Hi everyone i normally don't post up my problems because i can normally fix them myself or figure it out! but recently (approx 4 days ago) i have been getting 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable error on and off sometimes the site is functioning perfectly and sometimes i try and open it and its completely dead i get a 503 error message and thats about all. I was wondering if this can be caused because someone is DDosing my site? i am pretty sure its not the host because there are few other Rating: 5

[Loget]

A DDoS would cause slow loading times definitely not a error like this, have you tried rebooting your server, if it works after that then you can put it down to excessive traffic and try finding a more powerful server elsewhere.

[Scarface]

Sweet thanks for your reply i will try and reboot.

[Crucify]

did you try the reboot? cuz its still showing 503 at my end. you might want to get a backup server running for now, incase it's the server that's causing you problems.

[Scarface]

nah haven't tried yet i will soon!

[MRDJ]

r u on vps or shared? (cos u havent mentioned in the first post)

[Viz0n]

In your case, the 503's most likely means the HTTPd service lacks the resources(probably ram) to operate, most likely due to all the guests. If you are on a VPS, do some optimizations to free up resources.

Since you are running Apache, try and reduce the keep alive times and remove modules that are not really needed. That should hopefully give you a little more room to breath.

[Plutost]

Also if you are good in Server management, try Installing LiteSpeed or lighttpd
LiteSpeed rocks ! Apache does not lol
just kiddin..

[Scarface]

Email was sent to the hosting company and they have sent an email back saying the issue has been resolved. The site is currently working fine atm so i hope it stays that way! back to normal i hope it doesn't happen again i lost a lot of traffic ah well thanks to everyone who suggested a solution it helped a lot.

[Elio]

its loading very slow now .