VPS question for anyone who can help

[rstech]

I have a VPS account using plesk control panel.

Last week my website went down and again this week. For example, I could not access plesk through https://www.-------.com:8443 or gain access to my hosted website.

I was able to access the plesk control panel by using the IP address. Once in I rebooted the VPS and everything started working fine both times.

What could be the cause of this?

I am thinking it is the control panel. I lack the experience in working with a VPS to determine the cause.

Thank you ahead of time for the assistance.

[jason]

It is hard to say without some investigation, but one big problem for VPSes is often memory. If your VPS was running low on RAM then it may have started shutting down processes, such as the Apache process (resulting in you not being able to access your site). It could also be that a poorly written script and/or a high server load caused Apache to hang. By rebooting you (obviously) cleared out the memory problem, so all is well again...at least for the time being.

--Jason

[rstech]

Thanks Jason for the response. I guess the best thing to do is monitor it and watch for a pattern.

[rstech]

My website went down again today. I noticed that the DNS Server (BIND) was down/stopped. What could be causing this?

[JPC-Bryan]

You may want to check the system logs, usually in /var/log/ There should be a log file in there for most system services. It may be in /var/log/messages file as this is usually where bind logs to by default. This may say what is causing bind to mess up. There are many tutorials online that show how to make bind log to it's own file.