Intermittent 525 and 503 errors

[rebecca2]

Hi all,

For the last 2 days my website has been having problems.

Sometimes it loads very slowly, sometimes it shows a 525 error message and sometimes it shows a 503 error message.

I have a GoDaddy managed Wordpress and while I am almost certain the problem is with them, they are adamant that they have checked everything and that the problem is with Cloudflare.

They claim that the only way to solve it is to change my nameservers back to them.

The 503 error messages do not show “cloudflare” or “cloudflare-nginx”

Does anyone have any advice on how to definitively confirm that the problem is not with Cloudflare and how to resolve this?

Thanks

[M4rt1n]

Hi @rebecca2

@rebecca2

how to definitively confirm that the problem is not with Cloudflare

to do this we first have to look up what these errors stand for and what they mean.

Error 503: stands for “Service Unavailable / Service Temporarily Unavailable”
Error 525: stands for “SSL handshake failed”

So both Errors are happening behind/after CloudFlare and are triggered due to the gioven reasons, for which in both cases the origin server (your GoDaddy Servers/HostingPackages) are responsible for.
So if you see an error you normaly also do get some visual explanation where the it shows you where exactly the error is occurring:

Here for exaple it clearly tells you this particular Error 521 is happening due to the “Host” and not because of the USER nor due to CloudFlare.

Can you please post the error you exactly are seeing?

[rebecca2]

These are the error messages:

[M4rt1n]

These Errors are not happening because of CloudFlare. You can even test this manually:

Add your domain with the origin Server-IP to your local host-file on your machine and call the site again (this will call the site with bypassing CloudFlare at all)

Now the same error should occur.
Please show GoDaddy this thread and tell them they kindly should assist you and tell you at least where the problem comes from. But I as a member in the CloudFlare Community can not assist any further.

Anyway good luck and I hope they can tell you where at their end the error is comming from.

[rebecca2]

Thank you for confirming! I’ll go back to GoDaddy with this information.

[M4rt1n]

Let me quickly ask what SSL Mode you are in?

• None
• Flexible
• Full
• Full (Strict)

If you are in Full (Strict) please make sure you do have a valid SSL Cert installed on your origin Server otherwise it can trigger a Error 525 aswell. But as you told:

@rebecca2

I have a GoDaddy managed Wordpress

It actually is the job of GoDaddy to care about this as you pay for their service!
Feel free to forward this Thread to them so they can wuickly check these points to get your site fast up and running.

[rebecca2]

Thanks,

It is in Full Mode but I pay for an SSL certificate from GoDaddy.

I have already directed one advisor to the Cloudflare troubleshooting but I don’t seem to be getting anywhere. I will send them this link.

Thanks again!

[M4rt1n]

You are welcome!

[never1212]

Same story for me! I have contacted them twice already with the same problem. They are still blaming CloudFlare for that issue though I am almost sure that it is the fault of GoDaddy.

One tech guy from their support was mentioning that it is due to the “proxying” of the CloudFlare. In fact, if I turn A type DNS proxy off the 503 and 525 disappear. Maybe it may shed some light somehow.