Troubleshooting

Fixes for the problems that generate the most tickets, most are self-service in minutes. If your VPS is unreachable and you want a guided diagnosis, start with My VPS is Down, it checks your VPS and fixes several causes on the spot.

Start here#

• How to troubleshoot anything (and where everything logs). The method, the question-to-command table, and the log atlas every guide below assumes.

Can't get in#

• How to restore my SSH access. The step-by-step diagnosis: banned IP, your own firewall, or SSH itself.
• Commands to allow SSH access in common firewalls. The exact commands for ufw, CSF, firewalld, iptables, and nft.
• WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED. Normal after a reinstall, here's the one-line fix.
• cPanel/WHM: root login suddenly fails (cPHulk). cPanel's brute-force protection locking you out of your own server.

Network#

• Understanding and troubleshooting network problems. Whose fault is the lag, yours, ours, or a carrier in between, and how to prove it with mtr.
• Testing your VPS network speed. Speedtest CLI, our per-location test files, iperf3, and reading single- vs multi-stream results.
• My Port XXX is closed. Can you open it? Nothing to open, ports show open only when something listens, plus closed vs filtered decoded.
• Bots and crawlers are hammering my website. Identify them in the access log, robots.txt vs rate limiting vs fail2ban vs Cloudflare.

Email#

• Emails from my VPS go to spam. Diagnose with mail-tester and MXToolbox, then rDNS, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and reputation.
• My mail server isn't receiving email. The inbound chain: MX record, port 25 listener, outside testing, and the mail log.

Inside the VPS#

• My VPS is slow. How do I find out why? The systematic walk-through: path vs server, OOM kills, the four CPU hogs, monitoring, and website tuning.
• Fixing 502, 503, and 504 errors. The web server answered, the app behind it didn't, decode the error, read the proxy log, and the Docker cases.
• Fixing SSL certificate errors. Expired (the day-91 renewal failure), name mismatches, chains, mixed content, and Cloudflare's SSL modes.
• Fixing 403 Forbidden errors. Ownership after uploads, missing index files, deny rules, and why never chmod 777.
• My website didn't come back after a reboot or unsuspension. Started is not enabled, the fix for the post-payment "VPS is up but site is down".
• My VPS was hacked. Recovery, step by step. Why modern bots survive cleanup, the backup-and-reinstall routine, and how our suspension process works.
• Chrome shows a "Dangerous site" warning on my website. Google Safe Browsing flags, what was flagged, the cleanup, and the review that lifts it.
• I deleted files by accident. Can they be recovered? Stop writes, honest odds, and the real recovery paths through backups.
• MySQL or MariaDB won't start after a crash. The safe order: logs, disk, OOM, patient recovery, and force_recovery only to dump and rebuild.
• My cron job didn't run. The empty PATH, the % gotcha, silent failures, and making them noisy.
• Temporary failure resolving (DNS errors during updates). The systemd-resolved fix.
• My disk is full (and it took my website or database down). The hidden cause behind "my site is offline" and "MySQL won't start", find it, clean it safely, prevent it.
• No space left on device, but df shows free space. The often-missed inode exhaustion: millions of tiny files, not big ones.
• My VPS is using too much memory. What's wrong?. It probably isn't, how Linux memory really works.
• Why can't I clear the RAM cache?. You don't need to, and here's why.

Still need a person? You can open a support ticket any time.