What are the causes for a server to crash?

Hey all,
I've been developing my personal portfolio website with hosting provided to me by a friend. But unfortunately a few days ago, the server crashed and I couldn't access my WordPress site or my cPanel anymore. I don't remember doing anything risky on my site and all the plugins and theme were just from the Wordpress. But still the site has crashed and I want to know whether something I did was the cause for the crashing.

What kind of activities in WordPress can cause a server to crash?
Care to share your thought?

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Originally Posted by Shana

Hey all,
I've been developing my personal portfolio website with hosting provided to me by a friend. But unfortunately a few days ago, the server crashed and I couldn't access my WordPress site or my cPanel anymore. I don't remember doing anything risky on my site and all the plugins and theme were just from the Wordpress. But still the site has crashed and I want to know whether something I did was the cause for the crashing.

What kind of activities in WordPress can cause a server to crash?
Care to share your thought?

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This is something like " 500 Internal server error " or " Page not found" like that ? There are very basic and common situations like

1) Bandwidth or disc space or CPU/Ram/Inode usage reached its limit
2) htaccess isn't read/write able, permission issue or corrupted
3) incompatibility in plugin, theme or your server side core ( Eg: Php version, Apache missing necessary libraries,etc)
4) DNS records mismatch, memory usage , permalink, mod_rewrite bottleneck problems
5) Server hop latency, low performance hardware, security addons ( eg: CSF,symlinks,etc) may cause issues

However, it's all depends on what type of error that you are getting! always use updraft or backupbuddy to maintain incremental backup where you can restore or revert the changes from your end.

It was of the "The page took too long to respond" situation. I tried it every time and that's how it says, but all other sites load and work fine.
Disc space wouldn't have reached the limit, coz I did not do a lot of work on my site, just the basic outline.
Don't know about htacess, so I'm not sure of it.
Plugins were highly used ones, and I used Phlox theme, which has a good review and usage.

Other factors, I'm not familiar with. Is it possible for a crash if the php memory limit is increased?

I agree with this suggestion. You can describe accurate points whiche make causes to crash a server. Thanks for your precious post.