Why Your VPS Is On But Doing Nothing: Simple Causes and Quick Fixes

[johny899]

You log in to your control panel, and your VPS appears to be up. Hooray, right? And then you attempt to load your site—and nothing. No reaction, no login, nothing. What's happening?

Let's examine why your VPS may "be up" but completely worthless, and how you can revive it—without driving yourself crazy.

Stuck Processes Are Freezing Everything​

Now and then, a background job or script will simply run indefinitely and hang your server.

What might be the issue?

• A infinite faulty script
• A hung software update
• A rogue plugin in your CMS (yes, even WordPress gets it wrong)

How to fix it:

• Try opening your provider's rescue console
• Execute ps aux to identify what's running
• Kill anything suspicious with kill

One day, I updated my WordPress plugin to a halt—2 minutes to shut it down, and zap, site was up and running.

Too Many Requests at Once​

Have you ever had too many visitors or bots hit your website all at once? Your VPS can't handle it and just hangs.

This may occur when:

• You create a new campaign
• Search engine spiders flood your site
• Hacker DDoS or scans

Fastband-aids:

• Check for logs in /var/log/
• Firewall bad IPs with something like ufw
• Rate limit via NGINX or Apache

Pro tip: Protect your VPS from all that craziness with a CDN like Cloudflare

Misconfigured Services​

The server itself might be fine but apps within it aren't—such as NGINX, Apache, or MySQL.

Search for hints:

• Your site displays "502" or "504"
• SSH is fine but browser will not work properly
• Logs indicate services will not restart

Fix it in a jiffy:

• Check which services are not running with systemctl status
• Restart them with systemctl restart nginx (or whatever the naughty service is)

Final Tip: Small Checks, Big Fixes​

If your VPS is "awake" but not working properly, just be calm, panic not. Just do things step by step:

• Check for hung or stuck processes
• Check for traffic saturation
• Restart or repair misbehaving services

Bonus tip? Establish notifications so your VPS alerts you when something is not right—before your site visitors do.

Believe me, it's a whole lot of less hassle.