How to handle 504 and 521 Errors

[Digitaledge]

Our site utilizes Cloudflare and we have been continuing 500 errors. The most common ones are 504 and 521. Someone will be on the backend of our site creating content and when they go to save a story it throws the 521 error and their work is lost.

I am not sure how to troubleshoot or handle this type of situation. I have reached out to our hosting company numerous times who looks into this issue and reports that our database is functioning fine. So I wanted to reach out to the community here to see if anyone can offer assistance and what the best tricks are going forward where hopefully I can correct this going forward.

Error:

Thanks in advance!

[sdayman]

That wouldn’t be a database error. It’s often a firewall at the host.

Community Tip - Fixing Error 521: Web server is down

Error Try the suggestions in this Community Tip to help you fix Error 521: Web server is down. Background A 521 error happens when we are unable to make a TCP connection to your origin server. Specifically, Cloudflare tried to connect to your origin server on port 80 or 443, but received a connection refused error. This is often caused by security or firewall software and happens if the origin server has directly refused Cloudflare’s proxy request. [Banner in tip catalog] Quick Fix Ideas …

Community Tip - Fixing Error 502 / 504: Bad Gateway

Error Try the suggestions in this Community Tip to help you fix Error 502 / Error 504: Bad Gateway / Gateway Timeout. Background The 502 / 504 errors are quite similar. Generally, a HTTP 502 / 504 errors occurs because your origin server (e.g., your web host) is returning this code to us, and Cloudflare returns this code in turn to your visitors. They are caused by a problem connecting to an upstream server - meaning your server is trying to initiate a process and this fails to work as expect…

[Digitaledge]

If its a firewall issue at the host what steps can I take to resolve this @sdayman and what can I tell the end-user to try to resolve the issue on their end?

[MarkMeyer]

This has nothing to do with your end users. Allow / whitelist the net ranges below for port 80 and 443 and check the webserver configuration.

IP Ranges

[Digitaledge]

@MarkMeyer,

I should have the web hosting company do this on their end and nothing here on Cloudflare correct? I have multiple people reporting the 521 error when they create, save, and when we publish content. I did have the Cloudflare WAF turned on but disabled yesterday to see if it would help but no difference happened. Lastly, our hosting provider updated the time to respond on the PHP yesterday from 10 secs to 90 secs and this seemed to again make no difference.

[MarkMeyer]

@Digitaledge

Cloudflare WAF turned on but disabled

This is not caused by any setting in your Cloudflare account. Pause Cloudflare and check how long it takes to save new content, timeout on Cloudflare’s end is 100s.

Probably your host has security settings in place as well. Rate limitings for example.