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:

  PLESK_INFO: 404 Not Found

  PLESK_INFO: 403 Forbidden

• This may happen after changing the document root for the domain at Domains > example.com > Hosting & DNS tab > Hosting Settings.

• One of the error messages below may appear in domain's log at Plesk > Domains > example.com > Dashboard tab > Logs:

  CONFIG_TEXT: 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

  CONFIG_TEXT: [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 is stuck.

It can be an old subprocess: 

# 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

or two main processes running simultaneously:

# netstat -tulnp | grep ':80\>'
tcp6 0 0 :::80 :::* LISTEN 1696/apache2
tcp6 0 0 :::80 :::* LISTEN 615/apache2

# netstat -tulnp | grep ':443\>'
tcp6 0 0 :::443 :::* LISTEN 1696/apache2
tcp6 0 0 :::443 :::* LISTEN 615/apache2

Resolution

1. Log in to Plesk.
2. Go to Tools & Settings > Services Management.

3. Click the button next to Web Server (Apache) to restart the Apache service.

   If this does not help, kill the stuck Apache processes manually using the command-line instructions below.