Jason

Yes I am using WooCommerce

Thanks for the reply.

Yes the Membership option may work but at close to $300USD a year that is insane!!! I live in Australia so that is a lot more (about $500 per year) and completely unreasonable to do what I consider a very simple thing. I would likely not even make that from the product I need to hide to even make the cost worth the investment so that option is out the window.

The big issue I find with WordPress developers is they do not consider small businesses like me with some of these things. Sure $300USD is acceptable for a large business or if that was a 1 time purchase or it was heavily needed but that is a yearly suckscription cost on top of the $1000+ I already have to pay for plugins to make WordPress actually useful. It is what has me questioning switching from Joomla after all these years but sadly support for Joomla has dropped as many see an easier way to make income from WP.

I will look into some of the other options you suggest as a quick browse has some of those looking more reasonable in cost but man I wish just some of the core function of WordPress and Woo was actually useful or simple plugins had a 1 off purchase sometimes. Growing sick of everything being a money sucking subscription constantly even down to the 100 individual features needed to run a basic website.

So I seem to have solved this issue and it appears related to website cache being enabled.

I had already purged the cache on my site and in my web browser during tests but I had enabled some caching in WordPress global options when checking settings as I had Cache set off. I now recall I set cache to off because I was having numerous issues with pages in the store failing to correctly update when visitors would visit and also security token issues.

I had a user today message me about the security token issue and noted the cache setting set to Level 2 so I set it back to level 0 and I note the error is no longer appearing. Seems cache just causes all manner of problems so will just leave it disabled.

Thanks for the reply.

Sadly, a complete manual removal of Jetpack and a reinstall does not fix the issue. Only way I can solve the error is to just disable jetpack which is a pain to lose all the nice metrics on the admin home page but a functional site is more important and I just have no time to go testing every other aspect individually when the issue appears to be this plugin.

Yeah nothing from the host provider that they can identify (HostGator).

I have a staging site but I find it is problematic due to several plugins (like Elementor) that fail to load due to the license not being active on the sub /staging site which I don’t understand. It does make things difficult to accurately test since I can’t replicate things correctly but it is setup and just updated to allow me to at least try.

I have found an issue in the logs for a plugin I have which offers free downloads of zip files. My site is an ecommerce site that delivers hundreds of self developed libraries for music software and I have demo downloads freely available on each page with a free download option via a plugin Simple Download Manager. I noted in the logs for this plugin thousands of constant downloads from “AliyunSecBot Hong Kong” which afterr some googling I find this is a crawler bot designed to attack website resources. This has been hammering all these unprotected download links in constant waves and since all these downloads are delivered via PHP method in a “secured mode” as I understand the files are delivered using a CPU thread instead of a direct download of the file to the user so if too many are downloaded at a time this can cause the threads to max out for a period and this would make sense as to why I see the issue ramp up and down constantly in a day where for 30 minutes everything is fine then for 15 minutes the site hardly responds. The strange thing is these download attempts do not affect the download counters of these files which is why I never noticed this.

I have enabled reCaptcha for these downloads (reluctantly as my website is used by a lot of visually impaired users so I am trying to keep things like captchas to a minimum) which seems to have now halted this activity and I now note overnight another WP update was auto installed to my site so clearing caches this morning I do not want to jinx anything but seems things are running as normal. I have a lot of work to do today so will see how it goes but seems it could have been a bot attack on non safeguarded downloads.

Due to the lack of ANY reply from this company I decided to use a far better plugin called WP File Download which does everything this one does but also allows for AWS, OneDrive and Dropbox all in the same plugin. More importantly, they have an active forum with people that actually answer which is important when running a business.

I understand the differences between Joomla and WordPress, I used Joomla for 20 years

I also ran (again as mentioned) the same setup using Joomla, hosting all files from my sites server for 10 years with the only issue being some users had slow downloads if located a distance away but it was simple, very cost effective and reliable. Sadly the ONLY reason I have switched to WP is due to the components my store was based around (template, K2 component and QuickSell) all being made obsolete and not working in Joomla 4 or 5 requiring me to start from scratch.

So while I appreciate the reply, it does not address the question I am asking and that is this 300 second limitation, is this something in WordPress, Woo Commerce or a server issue. I have asked my server host who have confirmed they do no such limitations so I am now looking at WordPress or Woo Commerce as the culprit.

I already use Amazon S3 storage for the large files, however this is additional unpredictable cost which is exceeding my predicted budget already and will only increase after my initial 12 month trial which given I already have a GDrive and 1TB of web server storage, monthly costs on S3 storage seems like just a waste of money. The issue is I seem to have far too much generated traffic for the number of visitors I seem to have which does not make sense at all and is costing me money daily.

Forget it, seems the answers I am looking for no one seems to have here, I will do as I always do and just solve my own problems.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 4 months ago by Jason.

Sorry, does not really help. Of course I can “consult a professional”, change hosting provider etc but this will not save time/money, this will cost a considerable amount of both time and money.

As mentioned, for 10 year I ran a Joomla site on the same server for the exact same application and never had issues. While I really wish I had stuck to using Joomla I had to update and decided to try WordPress and WooCommerce which has been costing me 20x what it did with joomla to get the same function because while WP and Woo may be “open source” they are basically the shell of a car and everything that is needed to drive is a separate plugin and addon.

Anyway, my hope was I could find out how the download process is handled as it appears from my investigation the process uses a CPU thread to generate a download stream and this is being cut off at the 300 second mark. I simply want to know if this is the case and if the actual issue is related to how Woo is working or how the web server is working because ALL other tests I perform from other download management plugins work fine, just a product downloaded in Woo has 300 seconds to complete or it just ends the download and the file is useless.

I have implemented Amazon AWS and this works just fine, however again is another rather unpredictable cost I now have to invest in and this in turn is forcing me to have to increase my prices even further.