• Why does adding some of my sites not work?
• Does Better WP Security Work With CMS Commander?
• Using “Run Now” for a backup task works, but scheduled backups fail?
• Missing FTP information: Why do my plugin or theme updates not work and I get a FTP warning?
• My backups keep failing. What do I do?

Why does adding some of my sites not work?

The following are the most common reasons why adding a site to CMS Commander does not work:

• You are using a security plugin that prevents CMS Commander from connecting to your site. Try temporarily disabling all your plugins to see if adding your site works then. Most security plugins offer you a setting to whitelist certain IPs to exempt them from – if this is the case enter the CMS Commander IP (which is 85.13.143.135) and adding your site should work afterwards.
• Your webhost might be blocking CMS Commander, e.g. through a firewall or security script. Contact your webhost and ask them about it – in general they should be able to whitelist CMS Commander in order to make adding your sites possible.

Below are some other possible reasons why adding a site might fail:

• Your site is offline / down or not accessible by CMS Commander.
• The website you entered is not a WordPress site. For example it might be a static HTML page. Be sure to enter the exact URL of where WordPress is installed.
• If you changed your hosting or DNS settings recently it might take some hours until adding the site worked.
• Certain maintenance mode plugins can prevent CMS Commander from accessing your site. If you are using a maintenance mode plugin please disable it before adding your site.
• The CMS Commander client plugin is not installed or not activated on your website.

Does Better WP Security Work With CMS Commander?

Yes but there are cases where caching and security plugins like Better WP Security can stop CMS Commander from receiving accurate information about new plugin and theme versions. If you are using the Better WP Security plugin make sure to uncheck “Hide Theme Update Notifications”, “Hide Plugin Update Notifications” and “Hide Core Update Notifications” settings located in System tweaks under Dashboard Tweaks.

Using “Run Now” for a backup task works, but scheduled backups fail?

If you have a large number of websites in a single backup task it is possible this causes your server to overload or run out of resources to complete all the backups, since they are processed one after the other in quick succession. Try to move your sites in several separate backup tasks and run them 1 hour apart for example to solve that and reduce the stress on the server from each task.

Missing FTP information: Why do my plugin or theme updates not work and I get a FTP warning?

If installing plugin or theme updates do not work please first of all try logging into your WordPress admin and do the update from there to validate it is really a CMS Commander issue.

The most common cause of this is that you need to add FTP information to your website because installing updates on your server is impossible without them.

To add FTP information edit your blogs wp-config.php file and add the following lines below the database information in the file:

define(‘FTP_USER’, ‘username’);
define(‘FTP_PASS’, ‘password’);
define(‘FTP_HOST’, ‘ftp.example.org’);

Replace “username”, “password”, and “ftp.example.org” with your FTP login data provided by your webhost. For more information on FTP/SSH upgrades see the WordPress codex.

My backups keep failing. What can I do?

There are a few reasons that can cause problems with automatic backups:

1. You get unspecific errors, for example “Internal server error 500, Empty response, Failed to zip files, Upload to Amazon S3 failed, Upload to Dropbox failed, Upload to FTP failed or similar:

These errors generally mean that you have reached your server limits. Your site might be too big or your server ressources too small to complete the backup. To test this you can try to edit your backup task and set it to DB backup only instead of full backup. Since a database backup is much smaller in size it might work regardless and if it does it is almost certain your problem with full backups falls into this category.

In that case you can try the following:

– Increase PHP execution time and memory limit
Usually you will have to ask your hosting provider to do this for you because many hosts do not allow you to do it yourself. The required settings depend on many factors but generally a 600s execution time and a 256M memory limit are a good start. The necessary limits depend on the size of your website (and thus backup file): A larger site will require more memory for backups.

– Try excluding some files or folders from your backup
By default all files inside your wp-admin, wp-includes and wp-content folders will be included in full backups. If you have any unnecessary files or very large files in there try to excluding those folders by editing your backup task and adding the folders to the “Exclude” setting. In particular any caching or file storage folders should be excluded.

– Edit your backup task and check the “Less Compression” setting
This will result in bigger backup files but will require fewer server resources and improve performance.

– Allow the “mysqldump” and “zip” commands on your server
This is very important since those commands increase the backup performance greatly. Ask your host for details and to allow these commands if not the case on your server already.

– Enable the PHP Exec Function

– Turn of “safe_mode” in case it is active

2. Failed to extract database:

This issue does most likely occur because the “mysqldump” command is not allowed on your server. You can try:

– Ask your hosting provider to allow access to the “mysqldump” command
– If the “mysqldump” command is allowed and the backup still failes try repairing your database tables
– Check that your database user has the privilege to perform “mysqldump”. If not edit the user to have “All privileges”.

3. Permission denied, make sure you have write permission to wp-content folder:

You have to set the right folder permissions in FTP to make backups possible. See more details on permissions in the WordPress codex.
You need the correct folder permissions to backup your site. The correct permissions will depend on your hosting company. You can read more about write permissions on the WordPress Codex.

4. “pclZip” errors:

In this case please refer to point 1 in this list and ask your hosting provider to allow the “zip” command on your server (which is faster).