[Solved] Wordpress now causes server to throw a 503 error, what approach to take?

[stewguy]

Hi there, I moved to Plesk today. The other day, my Wordpress site was working. I moved and now there is a 503 service temporarily unavailable error. Perhaps it will take a while for all the services to get up to speed with my account being moved to Plesk? Perhaps something needs tweaked in my .htaccess file?

I am able to load GIF files I have up and a plain html file without such an error. Do I just have to wait while a service undergoes maitenance?

[wolstech]

Try changing your domain's PHP version to something else (then change it back if you need to, it seems to be the act of changing it that fixes things). I had weird errors like this with my site when my account first transferred, and changing the PHP version fixed it.

Another thing to try is to rename your .htaccess file. There are a few directives that cPanel supported but Plesk does not (Options -Indexes is one known one), so renaming the file to disable it will tell if this is the issue. If it is, you'd need to go through the file and determine which lines need to be commented out to make it work.

[Krydos]

Your site is working for me. If you changed anything please share so we can all learn.

[stewguy]

Yes, it is working for me now as well! I didn't change anything. It was just a matter of waiting for things on the server to settle down/be maintained I guess.

[Krydos]

When an account is transferred to Plesk the worthless transfer script sets all of the PHP versions to a disabled executable. Since the executable is disabled it will give a 503 error. My upgraded transfer script changed the PHP version to one that will actually work. I'm guessing that Apache and Nginx hadn't been restarted so it showed a 503 error for up to 2 hours after you were transferred and then it fixed itself. I've upgraded the transfer script to restart Apache and Nginx so it won't do a 503 error for up to 2 hours anymore.