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/

How to get a Bluehost staging site in 2020

There’s one page in the Bluehost knowledge base (at time of this post, on December 7, 2020) about how to setup a WordPress staging site https://www.bluehost.com/help/article/switching-wordpress-theme—

adding WordPress.com site to Bing takes time

I wanted to add my wordpress.com blog to the Bing search engine. I followed the instructions over there at bing.com/webmaster and added my URL djchuang.wordpress.com in the “Add a Site” field:

Can I add Google Analytics to a WordPress.com site?

To get Google Analytics site statistics on your website powered by WordPress.com, you will need to upgrade to the Business plan.

Here’s how it’s stated at this WordPress.com support article about Google Analytics:

Google Analytics support on WordPress.com is available as a feature of the WordPress.com Business plan. Visit Settings → Traffic under My Sites to enable Google Analytics.

If you paid for the right upgrade, you’ll be able to see a screen that looks something like this:

Is the answer yes or no for using Google Analytics on WordPress.com?