There is only one thing that could explain this: the connection between SiteGround and the Sucuri API service hosted here [1] is timing out. This happens when the DNS resolver is misconfigured or when the CURL extension is compiled with an outdated SSL library since the API is hosted via HTTPS.
You can try to send a HTTP request from your server, manually, and measure the time that it takes to return a response from the API. Alternatively, you can deactivate the communication with the API completely and rely on local logs to monitor the events in your website. Please refer to the settings page, there is a panel named “API Service” and another one called “Log Exporter”, disable the first one and then enable the second one.
[1] https://wordpress.sucuri.net/api/
Hello,
Thank you for your reply.
We passed this message on to Siteground and received this message in reply-
Thank you for getting back. I am able to confirm that the URL wordpress.sucuri.net can be resolved from the server per the check below:
Code:
our username@ukm12 [~]# curl -I https://wordpress.sucuri.net/api/
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 25 May 2017 00:41:47 GMT
Server: Apache
Connection: close
As for the check on the curl, can they provide more information on what to test and is this specific to protocol needed to connect to their api?
(end Siteground message)
Can you please provide more information as requested so that Siteground can make further tests to correct this problem.
Many thanks
Rather than checking if the API service is accessible from SiteGround’s servers they should have tested the connection time using a command like this:
curl "https://wordpress.sucuri.net/api/" -w "
HTTP Code: %{http_code}
Connection: %{time_connect} secs
Time to First Byte: %{time_starttransfer} secs
Total Time: %{time_total} secs
DNS Lookup: %{time_namelookup} secs
Download Speed: %{speed_download}
" -o /dev/null -s
If you want to get to the root of the problem, please ask SiteGround to execute the command above and check if the “Connection” and “Total Time” is lower than two seconds, if it is higher then run the same command with different DNS to see if their configuration is good. I will also send a request to our sysadmins to check the performance of the server where the API is running.
But anyway, rather than going back and forth with this ticket, lets just assume that the connection is okay. As I mentioned before, you can deactivate the communication with the API and enable the “Log Exporter” to keep track of the security events without relying on the API service. You can also increase the timeout for the HTTP requests, the option is also in the same “API Service” panel in the plugin’ settings page.
