Hello everyone. I was recently put in charge of a website :
http://www.femininbio.com.
It's a nice website with interesting content and a pleasing design. However, it crashes frequently - lately as much as two or three times a day. For a website funded by publicity, this is bad news indeed. Last weekend I didn't even realise it had crashed until Sunday evening - it had been down for over 24 hours. The website is hosted on a dedicated server at OVH, which is supposedly the number 1 supplier in the web hosting market in France. However all they can tell us there is to reboot the server if and when it crashes, and analyse the logs afterwards to figure out why.
The problem is that I have zero experience in web/systems administration so I don't really know what to look for. I did notice that the auth.log file was filled with "no user found" errors on hundreds of seemingly-random user names, as if someone was trying to hack into our system. So I installed fail2ban. However, since then, the "attacks", if indeed that is what they are, have taken a different form. Now, the site doesn't go completely down - it just takes ages and ages to respond (never actually responding, but not producing a 404 page either). We can ping the server, but we can't connect with putty, so we can't do a soft reboot but have to do a hard reboot which can apparently damage the system. So the situation is becoming quite urgent.
In fact, I was trying to connect the site right now to copy and paste some of the suspect lines from the log files, and the server crashed again. I've already done a hard reboot one time today!
Obviously I know I can't expect someone to analyse our server woes over a message board, but I'd really appreciate some advice on how to proceed. Are there websites or resources that can help a non-expert like me to resolve these issues, or do I need to look for a paying service or a consultant to analyse and audit our systems? What do other people out there do?
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