Hiryuu reported that their Discourse forum, hosted on DigitalOcean, went down after a missed payment by their sponsor. After paying to restore the droplet, the site remained inaccessible despite checking configs, rebuilding, and restoring backups. Running ./discourse-setup revealed connectivity issues on ports 80 and 443. Community members suggested checking domain renewal (Falco), restarting services post-power-on (Jagster), and investigating DNS issues (Arkshine). Hiryuu confirmed the domain was active, but Arkshine identified DNS/nameserver misconfigurations via intodns.com. After Hiryuu re-created the nameservers (with identical settings), the site came back online. Arkshine also noted potential theme/plugin issues and suggested safe mode for access. The root cause was DNS resolution, not server or config changes.
I’ve installed a Discourse forum like, 4 years ago, I think, in a DigitalOcean droplet… Although a problem here and there, was everything ok. I’m not really active in the forum anymore, but still visit it once or twice a week (have plenty of friends I made in the forum) and do the “tech things” when needed.
Long story short: Last weekend the site went down. Monday (yeah, in Christmas) a friend contacted me that the forum was down for 2 days. I then checked everything, and ends up that the our current “sponsor” 'forgot" to pay the DO host, so it obviously went down. To don’t let the other users bad, I paid it myself.
But the site was still down, so I started checking everything. As I still can acces by ftp or ssh, I looked at the domain, but is active. checked and rechecked the configs in DO and in the app.yml, but nothing seems to have been changed… Updated everything by SSH, rebuild it several times, disabled and enabled SSL, tried even going back a backup (either the Discourse one as DO one), nothing.
Then I decided to try a ./discourse-setup and it returns an error trying to connect either to ports 443 (“Port 443 of computer does not appear to be accessible using hostname gsbrazil.net”) and 80 (“Connection to http://gsbrazil.net (port 80) also fails”). I’m pretty sure no change was made in the configs (yeah, I’m the only one with access to DO and SSH), and the only reason I can imagine was the DO freezing the site because of the payment. But, since I paid it and can access by ftp and ssh…
This is very long shot but when DO shuts down a VPS they power off it totally. So just paying and powering on isn’t enough. There is need to restart every service one after one, and specially everything that is port/firewall things.
Not an expert. Ensure you use the right nameservers and your DNS entries look good (without duplicate).
EDIT; It looks like you fixed the domain!
EDIT2: Unfortunately, you have some trouble with theme components or plugins, feel free to use the safe mode if you need access to your forum (it works for me).
