Why is my website not working?


«Server not found» error

This error most often occurs for the following reasons:

  1. The domain registration has expired. You can check the domain’s registration period in your account under Services — My Domains or using a Whois service.
  2. The domain is not delegated, meaning there is no link between the domain name and the hosting service where the site is located (see the article «How to point a domain to hosting»).
  3. The site is inaccessible from a specific subnet. To check, you can use a Web proxy: Enter your site’s name in the search field and click GO. If your site is accessible there, the problem is with your internet provider. You will need to wait for your provider’s DNS servers to update. DNS server updates can take anywhere from 24 hours to several days.
     

Website won’t open WITH or WITHOUT «www»
 


Website won’t open without «www» before the domain name

Most likely, when adding the domain in the hosting control panel, you added not the domain itself but its subdomain www.your_domain. You will need to recreate the domain in the hosting control panel, adding it without “www” at the beginning (see the article Hosting a website).

Website won’t open with «www» before the domain name

Check if there is a www.your_domain alias in the hosting control panel. 

You can create an alias in the control panel under Web Server (Веб-сервер) — Sites (Сайты). In the table, find the site for which you are creating the alias and click on it. In the Site Management (Управление сайтами) window that opens, click Site Aliases (Синонимы сайта) and add the www.your_domain alias.

If the domain is not delegated to Rucenter DNS servers or you have DNS hosting enabled, make sure there is a CNAME record with «www».
 

Blank page on the site

A blank page may indicate that an error occurred during script execution.  Try enabling error display (see the article Diagnosing and troubleshooting website script issues).
 

Database connection error

In this case, the site may display messages such as:

  • DB error
  • Could not connect to MySQL
  • Error Establishing a Database Connection
  • Database connection error (2): Could not connect to MySQL
  • Unable to connect to the database

Check the database connection credentials. You can find the correct database connection details in the hosting control panel (see the article Connecting to the MySQL server). The database connection credentials must be specified in your site’s configuration file (see the article Configuration files of popular CMS).
 

Errors 403, 404, 500

According to the HTTP protocol specification, all server responses — in our case, Apache — are divided into the following groups:

  • 1xx: Informational
  • 2xx: Successful — the request has been processed and the document returned to the client
  • 3xx: Redirection — indicates that the user request has been redirected to another server, URL, etc.
  • 4xx: Client request errors — related to an incorrect URL request, missing required authorization, lack of access rights, etc.
  • 5xx: Server-side errors — related to user script failures, network connectivity issues, etc.

Most common server error codes:

Error code

Cause

Solution

403 Forbidden

The name of the site’s index file does not match the index file names defined in the server configuration, and directory content display is disabled with the Indexes option.

Example: The index file is default.html, but the server configuration specifies:

DirectoryIndex index.html index.php index.shtml index.htm

in the server configuration (or in the .htaccess file) the directory is prohibited from displaying the contents of the directory:

Options -Indexes

Add default.html to the index file list by adding the following line to the beginning of the .htaccess file: DirectoryIndex default.html

Missing execution permissions for a file in the cgi directory.

Example: You uploaded /home/[LOGIN]/Your_domain/cgi/test.cgi but did not set execution rights (u+x). Accessing http://Your_domain/cgi.bin/test.cgi gives a 403 error

Change file permissions via FTP or SSH with:

chmod u+x test.cgi

404 Not Found

The requested file is missing, or the server cannot locate it.

1. Use the hosting control panel to check server logs.

2. Upload missing files or fix broken links on the site.

500 Internal Server Error

The .htaccess file contains directives that cannot be processed by the web server. 

Example: It includes mod_rewrite directives, but the mod_rewrite module is disabled.

1. Use the hosting control panel to check server logs. 

2. Enable the required module in Web Server Management (Управление веб-сервером) in the hosting control panel.

Your script fails during execution.

Example: A Perl script cannot find a required Perl module.
 

1. Use the hosting control panel to check server logs.

2. Install missing modules or fix script errors.
 

For more details on the HTTP protocol and web server response codes, see RFC 2616.

If you experience website issues, the first step is to check your site’s log files for errors.

Descriptions of errors that may occur during PHP script execution are available in the article Diagnosing and troubleshooting website script issues.
 

Website works intermittently

Unstable site performance may be related to exceeding the RAM limit. A detailed guide on checking and reducing RAM usage can be found in the article Hosting resource usage.
 

Website displays with incorrect encoding (garbled text)

By default, UTF-8 encoding is used on the hosting. You can change the encoding in the hosting control panel under: Sites (Сайты) — your_domain — Settings (настройки) — Web server (Веб-сервер) — Site encoding parameter (Кодировка сайта).

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