Troubleshooting the 508 Resource Limit Reached error

Sure there could be many reasons that a website gets a 508 Resource Limit Reached error message. And the generic answers are what you might have to check into and troubleshoot.

But it sure is helpful when I finally found a customer service agent that could find the specific problem that was causing my website to become unavailable about once a week recently, even when I wasn’t doing anything in particular to edit my WordPress-powered website or update plugins or doing anything intensive, because I literally wasn’t doing anything on the website.

Some articles out there talk about looking at the Resource Usage snapshot or detail, to see the usage levels for CPU, Inotes, I/O, IOPS, Entry Processes, and Physical Memory. Nice graphs and charts to tell you the usage level, but they don’t tell you WHAT is using up those resources. That’s the information we actually need, you know?

In my situation, the problem was a bot attack from Panama. The customer service agent at InMotion Hosting, my current shared web hosting company for djchuang.com (and its add-on sites) looked thru the Activity Log and noticed a barrage of visits from one IP address, and that’s what queued up a ton of requests that used up the web server’s resources.

They explained, “I see hundreds of requests for different files from the same IP and user agent. That can fill up the entry processes which in turn spawns the 508 error.”

Stopping Bot Attacks in Cloudflare

The customer service agent suggested, “You might want to look into something like Cloudflare which has a very robust bot and automated attack prevention systems. They have a free tier which is what most people would need on their sites as their paid versions are more geared toward enterprise-level systems.”

And, good thing, that’s where I have my DNS for my website. I went over to Cloudflare, and made sure to turn ON the setting for Bot Fight Mode with all my websites. (under website > Security > Bots > Bot Fight Mode)

(Hopefully that’ll resolve things for weeks and months ahead. I’ll update this blog post if it all goes well, or not.)

Is Cloudflare Causing WordPress Redirect Loop?

How I fixed the WordPress installation on my web hosting service when it had a wp-admin redirect loop. I’m sharing this in hopes it will save hours of time for others.

First, I had registered a new domain name using the Cloudflare Registrar, which is one of the very few domain registrars that has at-cost pricing for registration and renewal. Then I setup my new domain name to point to the web hosting shared IP address by adding a DNS A record.

I did a fresh installation on my web hosting service (inmotionhosting.com) using Softaculous, and that was very easy. I was able to go to my new website (or new blog) home page, and see everything a-okay. However, but I got this redirect loop error message when I tried to go to example.com/wp-admin where I would normally go to login for the WordPress Admin Dashboard.

And, depending on your web hosting, you might have 1 of these 2 error messages:

Temporarily Unavailable
We apologize for the inconvenience, but this page is currently unavailable. Please check back again later.

429 Too Many Requests
The requested URL is rate-limited and has received too many requests within a short amount of time.

How I fixed the redirect loop for WordPress Admin and a Domain Registered at Cloudflare

I found more than a handful of articles with troubleshooting tips to fix the redirect loop on WordPress like at here and here and here. Those tips may fix other people’s WordPress situation, but it did not fix mine.

What I had to do was go back to the Cloudflare admin dashboard and turn off proxy for the 2 DNS records that pointed to my web hosting server.

Then I made a new installation of WordPress via Softaculous. Went all the way through to the admin link example.com/wp-admin and made sure everything was working. Then, and only then, I went back to the Cloudflare admin dashboard and turn ON proxy for those 2 DNS records.

Why did this make a difference, a big difference? It has something to do with how SSL works from a user’s web browser to the Cloudflare DNS and that goes to the web server. When that SSL connection is proxied by Cloudflare (instead of directly connected, without proxy), the WordPress admin and web server and SSL status gets confused and messed up or something that makes it not work. Hope this was helpful.

Other References

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/54728448/how-to-fix-the-https-wordpress-wp-admin-redirect-loop

https://community.cloudflare.com/t/endless-redirect-with-wordpress/3914/6

https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/264070/redirect-loop-when-trying-to-login-to-wp-admin

https://community.cloudflare.com/t/wordpress-admin-ssl-login-issue/67386/4

https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/272660/cloudflare-and-ssl-breaks-wordpress-mixed-content-unable-to-use-admin

https://community.cloudflare.com/t/ssl-redirects-wordpress-admin-to-a-404/43256/2

Fix For Redirect Loops on WordPress with CloudFlare’s Flexible/Universal SSL
https://www.icontrolwp.com/blog/enabling-cloudflares-universal-flexible-ssl-wordpress-without-infinite-redirect-loops/

where have all my websites gone?

I woke up this morning, in the usual way.. but this one is very different. All my websites are gone. Just gone gone. I’m on tech support and they’re investigating. This is not good. Countless hours of work in the thousands. Not sure I’ve reached the mythical 10,000 hours mark. Vanished into thin air?

I’ve been blogging 20 years, podcasting for over 10 years, a handful of other websites for good things, and they’re just gone. I have some backups, one website at a time, but it’s going to take many hours to restore and reconstruct. Lord help me.

To retrace my history, have to think up and recall all the websites that are affected, since I didn’t keep track of all of that. Let’s see, here’s what I’m remembering and noting, as I work on (some) restoration, and it’s making me wonder if I’m going to restore everything, or just some things.

DJ Chuang websites

djchuang.com #restored

erasingshame.com

multiasian.church #restored

multiethnic.church

thirty.network

socialmediachurch.net (the first 3 years)

aachristcollab.com

ailm.org

djchuang.com/move2007

djchuang.com/prayer

inkonpaper.colorbliss.studio

w**site.net (not crawled by internet)

My websites and blogs scattered elsewhere

open.djchuang.com

djchuang.wordpress.com

djchuang.tumblr.com

After the Weekend Update

https://djchuang.com/my-shared-hosting-data-was-lost-by-inmotion-hosting/

How to Delete Multiple Photos from Flickr

There’s a way to bulk delete photos in Flickr, but it’s not very obvious. But once you know, you know. Here’s how.

After you login to Flickr, go to https://www.flickr.com/photos/organize/ and that gets you to the Batch Organize feature.

how to use htaccess on nginx server

Web hosting used to be a lot more lenient and allowed different language encoding on a per page basis, by using a META tag in the <HEAD> section like:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=big5"> 

But recently discovered that my web hosting server (and perhaps many others) have a server-defined language character set encoding, and the META tag is ignored, so to speak.

When Did UTF-8 Take Over as the Web Standard