[KoryKeymaster]

Hey everybody,

As some of you may know, over the past couple of weeks we have received a few reports from our users relating to issues with Visual Composer (i.e. timeout errors, servers crashing, et cetera). Through much investigation we concluded that the problem was related to Visual Composer usage on certain hosting environments, although most (if not all) situations seemed to center around GoDaddy shared hosting.

Even though this issue did not appear to be theme related, we immediately consulted with the team at WP Bakery in order to rule out any error with the theme. Upon personally reviewing our theme and integration files, we were notified that there were no such issues with the theme that could be causing this. Even though we were assured there were no problems with the theme, we continued to investigate in order to provide some answers to those who were experiencing this problem. What we found was that these errors were occurring with all themes including Twenty Twelve, Twenty Thirteen, and Twenty Fourteen, which are all developed by the core WordPress team. We were using Visual Composer with all of its own native functionality and shortcodes on these tests, there was no custom integration at all. We have numerous recorded instances of this occurring, a few of which can be seen below (note they are quite large and might take a while to download completely):

• Twenty Twelve
• Twenty Fourteen
• Twenty Fourteen

Upon sharing more of our findings over the weeks with WP Bakery, we were finally told that our ticket would be elevated to the development team to investigate. Just today we have received a response from the team confirming that the issue is indeed completely related to Visual Composer and certain hosting environments:

“I just heard back from our development team. Unfortunately, they are not able to trace the exact cause of the issue, but it should be related to the resource usage as it is related to the shared hosting and resources used on shared hosts are minimum…The issue is on our bug list and the development team might take a look at it in future.”

We are hoping that the Visual Composer team will address this issue sooner rather than later for all of their users who might be utilizing GoDaddy shared hosting. It should also be noted that we have had numerous users who have reported this issue has been fixed after they switched to another host (likely due to increased memory allowances).

If you have any further questions about this, please feel free to email us. We will add to this post when Visual Composer has more to share.

Update 1 – May, 2014: We made a few modifications to the integrated version of Visual Composer that have helped streamline the plugin for shared hosting environments.

Update 2 – August, 2014: Many customers have commented how once they switched away from GoDaddy’s shared hosting to even the newly launched WordPress specific hosting by GoDaddy that all issues were fixed. As it appears their newly launched WordPress hosting (which incidentally looks even cheaper than most of their shared plans) has rectified this issue it would be worth looking into, however to check everything ourselves, we setup a test hosting account at GoDaddy on their standard shared hosting and the theme and corresponding plugins work just fine. If there is still an issue and you are on one of GoDaddy’s shared servers I would suggest contacting them and/or moving to their new WordPress platform.

[Author]

Posts