Site crash twice in one week on BlueHost

• amroberts2

  said

  I have had my site crash twice within the period of one week. The first crash was discovered on Friday 4/19. SiteLoc monitors our site and provided the following based on their investigation.

  =======================================================================================
  SiteLoc evaluation:

  We have finished manually reviewing your website and confirm it is malware free. With that being said, the site was still resolving to the errors, so I started doing a bit of digging. I did a pretty deep dive, following new errors, in an attempt to get the website back online, and I was only partially successful, but I think I’ve identified the potential issue. Ultimately, this is an issue with the theme and/or PHP version. After digging around, most issues came back to the following file:

  • /home/mercyfli/public_html/mercyflightcentral-dev.org/wp-content/themes/parallelus-vellum/framework/includes/load-functions.php
  Looking at this file, I found the following 2 lines of code (specifically, Lines 37-38):
  • // Unsupported in old PHP versions
  $data_types_list[$data_type_slug]['classname']::assign_actions_and_filters();

  The “//” at the beginning of the first line is how you comment out code (essentially allowing you to add comments that don’t actually attempt to execute code). Because this indicates that it’s not support in old PHP versions, I figured maybe the PHP version changed, which I’ve heard happening randomly (or not) after the host makes a change.
  Unfortunately when I tried to change the PHP version for testing, the control panel errored out. Instead, I re-visited the code above and added “//” in front of the second line (line 38), just to see what would happen if that code wasn’t there.

  The result is what you see on the website right now. It still loads the errors, but the website is partially accessible below the errors now.

  At this time, you’re going to need to contact the host and ask whether there were any changes made to your hosting or server recently that may account for this. Don’t forget to mention the PHP version possibly being changed to see if that’s something that can be looked into. If this doesn’t fix the issue, you may need to speak to the host about restoring from a backup, or you may want to have your developer re-install the theme from a backup, if possible.
  We will continue to monitor your website and inform you if our scanner finds anything malicious in the future.

  =================================================

  After this detailed response, I uploaded the most current theme version via FTP and the site issues were resolved. Monday 4/22, the site crashed again due to PHP issues.

  Bluehost was not able to resolve this issue and recommended that I reinstall an updated version of the theme, even though they knew that I did this previously. I have since updated to the most current version of WP and the theme. I’m hoping this is the last of this particular issue but would welcome any insight as to what may have occurred and how to avoid (?) in the future.

  Thanks.

• amroberts2

  said

  This is how my site looks only a few hours after I uploaded the most recent theme:

  [24-Apr-2019 22:02:08 UTC] PHP Fatal error: Class ‘Data_Type’ not found in /home/mercyfli/public_html/mercyflightcentral-dev.org/wp-content/themes/parallelus-vellum/data-types/code-editor/code-editor-type.php on line 2 [24-Apr-2019 22:02:09 UTC] PHP Fatal error: Class ‘Data_Type’ not found in /home/mercyfli/public_html/mercyflightcentral-dev.org/wp-content/themes/parallelus-vellum/data-types/code-editor/code-editor-type.php on line 2 [24-Apr-2019 22:02:11 UTC] PHP Fatal error: Class ‘Data_Type’ not found in /home/mercyfli/public_html/mercyflightcentral-dev.org/wp-content/themes/parallelus-vellum/data-types/font-select/font-select-type.php on line 3 [24-Apr-2019 22:02:13 UTC] PHP Fatal error: Class ‘Data_Type’ not found in /home/mercyfli/public_html/mercyflightcentral-dev.org/wp-content/themes/parallelus-vellum/data-types/font-select/font-select-type.php on line 3 [24-Apr-2019 22:02:18 UTC] PHP Fatal error: Class ‘Data_Type’ not found in /home/mercyfli/public_html/mercyflightcentral-dev.org/wp-content/themes/parallelus-vellum/data-types/range-slider/range-slider-type.php on line 3 [24-Apr-2019 22:02:19 UTC] PHP Fatal error: Class ‘Data_Type’ not found in /home/mercyfli/public_html/mercyflightcentral-dev.org/wp-content/themes/parallelus-vellum/data-types/range-slider/range-slider-type.php on line 3

• jeffw

  said

  This is very odd behaviour.

  May I just make sure that I understand you correctly?

  Are you saying that directly after installing and activating Vellum and its required and recommended plugins your site works properly, but then, after some period of time, suddenly it breaks?

  If that is what’s happening, the cause is most likely to be a server issue. The theme cannot break all on its own. If reinstalling the theme fixes the problem, and then some time later suddenly the problem comes back without you having done anything, the theme cannot cause that to happen.

  I know you have done this several times already, but let’s try reinstalling the theme again because the error messages that are being reported suggest a file is missing. Sometimes when you download or extract the zip file it can experience an error and corrupt a file. That can also happen during the upload process.

  This is the exact procedure to follow when reinstalling the theme…

       - First deactivate all additional plugins so that the only active plugins are the four that come with Vellum.
       - Then download the latest version of the Vellum theme from ThemeForest (the “Installable WordPress file only” option).
       - Unzip the file you downloaded from ThemeForest to create a ‘parallelus-vellum’ folder on your computer.
       - Use FTP to delete the ‘parallelus-vellum’ theme folder on your server.
       - Use FTP to upload the new ‘parallelus-vellum’ theme folder from your computer to your server.

  Please don’t reinstall the theme any other way, please follow the instructions above exactly. If you do not follow these instructions exactly then you may lose your theme settings, i.e. they could all revert to the default settings.

  It is important that you download the theme again from ThemeForest because it has been known for zip files to become corrupted in transmission.

  It is also important that you first delete the existing ‘parallelus-vellum’ theme folder on your server before you upload the new one. If you don’t do this you could end up with a theme folder with missing files and a mixture of templates from older and newer versions of the theme, and that can cause problems.

  So it is very important that you first delete the existing ‘parallelus-vellum’ theme folder on your server before you upload the new one.

  Do not have multiple Vellum theme folders in ‘wp-content/themes’, that alone can cause unpredictable problems. If you feel the need to store old versions of the theme, either download them to your computer and store them there, or move them to another location on your server. When I need to do this I create a ‘backups’ folder in ‘wp-content’.

  After reinstalling, remember to refresh your browser’s caches so that it’s not using cached versions of the theme’s CSS and JavaScript files…
       → http://www.refreshyourcache.com/en/cache/

  Please give that a try and if you still have this issue afterwards let us know and we will work from there.