Rebooting a Lightsail instance, but wordpress (whole site) not loading

My site was running like a dog and so, having cleaned the database, updated plugins, turned off plugins etc, decided to reboot my AWS lightsail server instance. I made sure – by reading a whole host of articles and blog posts – that this wasn’t going to delete my content.

So then I hit reboot and waited. I was expecting the site to be offline for a while. But when it wasn’t back after 10 minutes I started to panic.

A google search shows this isn’t uncommon and that apache might need to be restarted through the server console. I did that using:

sudo /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh restart apache

But that didn’t work. A quick check on status using: sudo /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh status showed that apache wasn’t running.

So then tried starting apache – suo /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh start apache – no joy. but this did tell me that “httpd could not be started”.

A google search seemed to suggest that this was related to SSL keys, but that didn’t make a lot of sense as I hadn’t changed that. So a deeper search gave the answer. It seems that my instance was also running services for apache2 – sudo service --status-all showed everything and in the lists was apache2. This needed to be stopped first. So that’s what I did and then restarted:

sudo service apache2 stop

sudo /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh start apache

Happy days. The site is back.

This is here so that I don’t have to trawl through the internet the next time I have a problem.