Entry process failures on simple wordpress websites

Hosting Support
1

Website URL

www.archeryclub.co.uk

Error Message

I’m locked out of this site because of entry process failures. Is this a design flaw in the service?

On 9th I had a massive spike of entry process failures causing the site to lock out. There was a traffic and CPU spike on 7th/8th but nothing on the 9th.

Other Information

This is a very very basic wordpress site (it really couldn’t get much simpler) with very few plugins, so how can I diagnose what could possibly be causing these issues?

I had a similar issue with another, incredibly simple site, the day before. Sudden huge entry process failure spike out of nowhere which killed the site for a day.

Anyone know how to diagnose such issues on a bog standard wordpress install? Is there something happening in standard installs that infinityfree just doesn’t like?

2

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3

What are they? A bunch of light plugins would not cause an issue but one really heavy one can.

4

I’ve removed all plugins except wordfence, and I’ve now moved it behind cloudflare to see if that does anything to calm down these errors.

5

Well, Cloudflare didn’t help directly
I ended up getting so much bot traffic to the site, much of which wasn’t actually cached and got through to site, that the site kept getting taken down time after time. I had to block all non-UK traffic on Cloudflare before I could get any stability at all.

Even small amounts of bot traffic are simply taking down the free sites so easily as to make it almost impossible, especially for a wordpress site when WP is the focus of so many attacks, these days/

6

Its not ideal, but i found by switching cloudflare to “I’m under attack” mode its stopped almost all bot traffic dead.

7

I strongly recommend just enabling the “I’m under attack” mode too. It’s very effective at stopping bots, regardless of their location, and is a much more precise instrument than just blocking entire countries.

The resources we provide with free hosting accounts are generally sufficient for a small to medium sized website with low traffic, but attack traffic can use a lot of extra resources and quickly trigger limits.

8

Thanks guys, I’ve kept some countries blocked (Russia seems to be one of the major sources, as is indonesia), but I will try “under attack” mode to see what happens.

9

One warning with under attack mode. It may display an entry challenge (usually a just a moment screen, and sometimes an “I am human” tickbox) to all visitors. but it does seem to stop 99% (personal opinion, not actual factual measures) of bots