WordPress on DigitalOcean – Error establishing a database connection

Today this website wasn’t working for a few hours.

My website is built with WordPress and is hosted on DigitalOcean. They were doing server maintenance — usually, that does not cause any issues but this time it did.

When I tried to access my website, I got this error:

I found out that the issue might be that the MySQL server was turned of.

To fix that I logged in to my droplet web console and ran:

sudo netstat -plt

It showed me programs listening for connections. However, MySQL was not on the list:

Since MySQL was not listed, it was not running. I needed to start MySQL:

sudo systemctl start mysql

To check if MySQL started I ran the netstat command again. And this time MySQL was on the list:

That fixed the issue for me.