Having a website crash is annoying, having it be down for a week is very, very annoying.
I have spent the last week trying to work out what had killed my blog (for the second time in a month). Initially I thought it was connected to the file server issues that Dreamhost was having, and their first support response suggested the same. But when they eventually got their issue solved my blog didn’t come back to life.
Its was strange because all my other Dreamhost hosted sites were working, and even my support forum was working and its under the same domain as this blog. The next suggestion was that it could have been the WP 2.1.1 exploit…but I hadn’t install 2.1.1. Anyway I upgraded to 2.1.2 in the hope that it would fix the problem…no.
Next step, and the one that I wanted to avoid, was to backup everything and do a fresh install of Wordpress. While in the process of backing everything up, I noticed that the wp-content/cache folder was rather large (about 59 mb)…which didn’t seem right considering my whole site is only about 10MB.
So….I delete the 800-odd cache files, and guess what. Now my blog works again. Shit hey? I have left wp-cache disabled for the time being, at least until I’m sure that I have the absolutely latest version. It would appear that the Dreamhost file server issue was not the problem afterall. Although the timing has to be more than just coincidence, perhaps the file server problem corrupted something in the wp-cache folder, thus brining the blog down.
Either way I’m back (again), lets hope this ends the bad run of problems experienced in the past month.
