How to Fix a WordPress Times Out Error on a Godaddy Hosting Account

You wake up one day and find your websites aren’t displaying the latest posts anymore. You check your site’s stats and find that several days have passed without any new content being published to it. You begin to panic as you realize that something is wrong. You checked all the usual places for help, but none of them seemed to work. You finally decide to try a backup and restore on your site’s database, but even that doesn’t seem to work. Frantic, you call your web host and explain the situation. You hear nothing but crickets until finally, someone picks up the phone and says, “I’m sorry, but we aren’t allowed to help with backing up or restoring a MySQL database.”

Panic sets in once more. You begin to realize this isn’t a one-time event and that you’re going to have to do something about it. You’re stuck in a catch-22. You can’t contact the web host directly to try and sort this out, because they won’t allow you to. But without any help you have no chance of recovering your site’s data. What do you do?

The best solution, as always, is to back up your site’s data manually. Thankfully, this isn’t as difficult as it sounds. In this article, we’ll discuss how to fix a WordPress times out error on a Godaddy Hosting Account so you can get your site back up and running as quickly as possible.

Check Your Server’s Status

The first step in fixing a WordPress times out error problem is to make sure that your server isn’t overloaded. You can use several different tools to test the load average on your server. The most popular one is called Haproxy and you can find out more information about it here. Haproxy is a web server that’s been around since the late 90’s and it was originally developed for the http://www.haproxy.org/ website. Haproxy can be used to monitor the load average on your server at any given moment and it provides a fairly accurate picture of what’s going on. If you want to troubleshoot your server’s load average issue, you can download Haproxy here.

Restore The Data From A Previous Backup

The next step is to attempt to restore the data from a previous backup. It’s important to realize that in order to do this you’re going to have to find the database backup you made before this problem started. If you haven’t made any previous backups, then it’s time for you to make some. There’s not a lot of point in trying to fix something if you don’t know what it was that you were trying to fix. The key is to find the previous backup and restore it. This will usually fix your problem because the backup contains the same data as your original database, but with all the latest changes applied. Once you’ve restored the data from the previous backup, you can test your site by running it from a local host. If all goes well, you can then publish your site to see if it’s completely fixed.

However, sometimes this doesn’t work and you have to try something different. Sometimes you have to remove data from your database and then restore it. For example, if your site has a lot of spam comments that were caught by Akismet before the backup was made, then you’re going to have to remove those comments in order to restore the data. This may seem like a lot of work, but if it were easy, then everyone would be doing it and the load on your server would likely be down to nothing. So, rather than trying to tackle this issue all at once, try to break it down into manageable chunks. If you’re able to, then it’ll make the process a lot easier. In some instances, you may have to go through and manually fix every single broken link on your site. This is a tedious process and it can take a lot of time, but it’s a better option than trying to tackle the issue all at once and potentially causing more damage. Even a small amount of work can make a world of difference and it often pays off in the end.

Use Other Tools To Check Your Database’s Health

Once you’ve restored the data from a previous backup and you’re confident that everything is now working correctly, it’s time to check your database’s health using other tools. The best way to do this is to login to your database via PHPMyAdmin and use the built-in tools available to you there. For example, you can use the charts to monitor the amount of space used by your tables and the queries that are executed against them. You can use the Activity tab to monitor your database’s load and performance over time. Use these tools cautiously and thoroughly, as they can all be used maliciously to damage your database. However, if you’re using a decent web host, then they’re going to take care of any potential problems before you even notice they happen. So, rather than getting in the way of things, it’s better to just let them do their job and keep an eye on your database from time to time using these tools.

Use The Right Encoding For Your Database

The next step is to use the right encoding for your database. Whenever there’s text or other content stored in a column of a table, binary data is generally stored using a different encoding standard than the one used for the rest of the column. For example, if you have a column named “content” and that column contains image content, then you should probably use an image file type like.jpeg or.png for that column. This is because, when displayed on a web page, the image content will be interpreted as binary data by the browser and it will not be displayed the same as it was in the database. To properly store and retrieve image data from a MySQL database, use the following:

• Image files encoded in.jpeg or.png format.
• The JPEG 2000 image format for handling images with very large file sizes.
• The Base64 or MIME-Base64 encoding for safely sharing large amounts of binary data (e.g., images or music files)