The “Error establishing a database connection” is probably one of the most common and frightening errors that WordPress users can encounter. It’s definitely a close tie with the white screen of death (WSOD). This error means your website is no longer communicating or has access to your WordPress database, and thus your entire website goes down.
The most common causes are:
1. The authentication data in the MySQL server is incorrect
- make sure that in wp-config.php you have the correct information to connect to the database
The easiest way to test if the MySQL user data is correct is to log in to PHPMyAdmin with the user and password used in wp-config.php for the database entered in the configuration. Another option is to connect from the SSH terminal (for subscriptions that allow this type of access) to the MySQL server.
mysql -u utilizator -p'parola';
use data_base_wordpress;The wp-config.php file is located in the root directory where Wordpress was installed; it contains the authentication data in your database and has the following form:
define('DB_NAME', 'database-name');
define('DB_USER', 'database-username');
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'database-password');
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');For proper operation, the authentication data must be valid. If you cannot log in to PHPMyAdmin using the MySQL user and password entered in this file, you will need to reset the MySQL user password and ensure that that user has rights to that database.
2. Your database is corrupted
In case you get the error "Error establishing a database connection" but you can log in to the Wordpress administration panel where you have another notification in the form One or more database tables are unavailable, we recommend that you try to repair the database.
After version 2.9, Wordpress provides a method to repair databases that return this type of error.
To use this method, edit the wp-config.php file and add the line of code below:
define('WP_ALLOW_REPAIR', true);Save your changes and log back in to your site's admin panel. In the Dashboard you have the Repair option available.
In addition to this option, you can also use Optimize; this removes items that are not needed in the database.
3. Issues with your database server
If you use shared hosting and have a lot of traffic, the large number of competing MySQL connections can generate this error. For such situations we recommend one of the specialized WordPress hosting packages from the HostX offer.
