The best place to look if you are experiencing issues with your website is the sites error log files. You can access your websites log files from within your websites dashboard on the logs page. 


More details on how to find your log files can be found in a separate KB article, here. 


This guide explains how to read your log files as well as some basic tips for troubleshooting issues with your websites on the Nimbus Hosting platform.  


Types of log file


apache-error.log - This is the most important one! It will contain website errors, including PHP errors for your site.

nginx-access.log - This log contains a list of visitors to the site.

nginx-error.log - This log will typically be empty unless you are using the "Use NGINX to serve static files" feature.


How to read the logs


  • Each line in the log will contain various pieces of information about the error such as the date/time, the IP of the user, the path to the script causing the issue and the URL.
  • The example below is a entry from a sites Apache log:

    [Mon Jul 26 12:35:44.375523 2021] [proxy_fcgi:error] [pid 1944:tid 139763403192064] [client 213.105.78.2:40190] AH01071: Got error 'PHP message: PHP Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /home/storm/sites/yourwebsite-co-uk/public/wp-admin/includes/plugin.php on line 1772', referer: https://www.yourwebsite.co.uk/wp-admin/edit.php


  • This can be broken down into the following:


Now that you have the above information you can see that line 1772 of plugin.php is causing the error so you can go ahead and fix this. You also now know the URL that triggered the error so once the issue has been fixed you can revisit the URL to see if any further instances of the same error are being logged. 


Common website issues


  • 500 internal server error - Most typically caused by having the sites PHP memory limit too low. Try increasing "memory_limit" setting on the sites PHP configuration page which can be found here. 
  • PHP Fatal Errors - These are generally caused by issues with your sites code. Normally the error message will show you the path to the file as well as the line of code that is causing the issue.
  • PHP Warnings - Same as above, warnings however don't typically manifest as issues on the front end of the site
  • 403 forbidden - Normally due to permissions, if you see a 403 message on your site you can reset your sites permissions here.