24th August 2024

Shared/Reseller Hosting Performance Issues

Shared Hosting Performance Issues - August 24, 2024

We are currently experiencing elevated load on multiple of our shared hosting servers. This issue is not location specific and impacts all shared hosting infrastructure. This issue is affecting performance and may cause slower than usual load times or intermittent connectivity for PHP/MySQL based applications (e.g., WordPress sites) hosted on our shared/reseller hosting platform.

Cause:

The performance degradation is primarily due to issues related to the third party Wordpress plugin developed by Litespeed, the LiteSpeed Cache (LSCache) plugin. Recently, Litespeed released an announcement that LSCache versions prior to version 6.4.1 are vulnerable and problematic.

Many accounts within our shared hosting servers have not yet updated to the latest version of this plugin, which is creating unexpected higher than normal server load.

What We're Doing:

Our team is actively working on a solution to mitigate the impact and resolve the underlying issue. We are:

  1. Investigating the root cause of the elevated server load
  2. Working on implementing a fix across our shared hosting infrastructure, and ideally identifying a way to either work around the issue such as via WAF rules, or a method to mass update all LSCache installations to 6.4.1.

Senior engineers from our team are involved, and we are also working closely with cPanel and Litespeed Support accordingly.

Expected Behavior:

Users on our shared/reseller hosting platform may temporarily experience:

  • Slower than usual website load times
  • Intermittent connectivity issues when accessing PHP/MySQL based applications
  • Temporary unavailability of some websites

Recommendations:

If you are using the LiteSpeed Cache plugin on your WordPress site, we strongly recommend updating to the latest version (6.4 or later) as soon as possible.

Next Update:

We will provide another status update on here as soon as there are significant developments.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and thank you for your patience as we work to resolve this issue.

UPDATE 12:12 AM, Aug/25/2024: A fix has been identified, and we are rolling out said fix across all servers. By now, most users should already be seeing a major improvement. We will update once this is fully resolved or once we have more information.

UPDATE 1:08 AM, Aug/25/2024: The fix has been rolled out across our entire shared hosting cluster, and is under observation. The results so far are promising. We'll continue monitoring this before we consider this as fully resolved.

UPDATE: We are pleased to announce that the issue has been fully resolved. Our team has successfully implemented the fix across all servers, and normal service has been restored.

We are closely monitoring our infrastructure to ensure continued stability and optimal performance. Our technical team remains vigilant to prevent any potential recurrence of this issue.

We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. If you continue to experience any problems or have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact our support team.

Thank you for your patience and understanding throughout this process. We appreciate your continued trust in our services.