Knowledge Base

A website or webmail hosted in Plesk periodically shows the Plesk/web server default page or old website content

Symptoms

A website or webmail periodically shows the Plesk default or Plesk login page, Apache test page or old website content.
Pages of the website may not load with the error:

404 Not Found

403 Forbidden
This may happen after changing the document root for a domain at Domains > example.com > Hosting & DNS > Hosting Settings.
The following error message may appear in domain's log file /var/www/vhosts/example.com/logs/error_log:

AH01276: Cannot serve directory /var/www/vhosts/example.com/httpdocs/: No matching DirectoryIndex (index.html,index.cgi,index.pl,index.php,index.xhtml,index.htm,index.shtml) found, and server-generated directory index forbidden by Options directive

[error] 22517#0: *36460 openat() "/var/www/vhosts/example.com/httpdocs/index.html" failed (2: No such file or directory), client:

Cause

Apache (sub-)process has stuck.

# ps uaxf | grep [a]pache
root 723810 0.0 0.5 194584 144184 ? Ss Apr07 3:06 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
www-data 723811 0.0 0.5 193308 140564 ? Sl May10 36:00 _ /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
www-data 723812 0.0 0.5 194484 140108 ? S 10:39 0:00 _ /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
www-data 725215 13.1 0.6 2128208 158620 ? Sl 10:47 0:55 _ /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start

Resolution

Log in to Plesk.
Go to Tools & Settings > Services Management.
Click the button next to Web Server (Apache) to restart the Apache service.

If that does not help, kill the stuck Apache processes manually using the command-line solution:

Command-line instructions

Connect to the Plesk server via SSH.
Stop the Apache process:
- on CentOS/RHEL-based distributions
  
  # service httpd stop
- on Debian/Ubuntu-based distributions
  
  # service apache2 stop
Check if there are any hung processes with the command:

# ps uaxf | grep [a]pache

If the output is non-empty:

root 8637 0.0 0.2 287780 46124 ? Ss Jun26 0:55 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
www-data 8927 0.0 0.2 286504 43968 ? S Jun26 0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
www-data 8928 0.0 0.2 287696 44424 ? S Jun26 0:46 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start

kill these processes using their PID:

# kill -9 8637 8927 8928
Start the Apache process:
- on CentOS/RHEL-based distributions
  
  # service httpd start
- on Debian/Ubuntu-based distributions
  
  # service apache2 start