Since May 22, several of my sites on OVH shared hosting have been experiencing issues with Google Search Console.
GSC shows:
“Crawl via robots.txt file: high failure rate”
“Server connectivity: high failure rate”
“Server connection error”
“Unavailable due to a problem affecting the entire site”
(see attached screenshot)
The problem currently affects three different sites hosted at OVH.
The sites remain accessible to visitors, Google Analytics shows normal traffic, the logs mostly show 200 responses but new pages are not being indexed.
Googlebot does receive an HTTP 200 on the home page and robots.txt.
Same issue on my side with an OVH Perso shared hosting, on cluster100.
Google Search Console can’t retrieve my sitemap.xml because it already blocks on the robots.txt.
However, on my end, the robots.txt and sitemap.xml files are accessible and return HTTP 200. The site pages do as well.
I’ve tested several things on the site side, but I don’t see anything abnormal. It’s still impossible to ask GSC to fetch a sitemap, the robots.txt, or even any page of the site.
Access logs: nothing abnormal regarding Googlebot/GSC, no visible 403s on robots.txt or the tested URLs.
Error logs: many ModSecurity warnings with a low score (Inbound Score: 2), but no explicit blocking of Google. The only real 403s are for suspicious requests without a User-Agent to PHP/WordPress files.
The story of the missing User-Agent: if I recall correctly, OVH has put a mechanism on the front‑end nginx servers that presents an extra challenge when the client does not provide a User-Agent.
These requests never even reach the Apache server.
That could explain it. I don’t know where OVH would have documented it. Maybe in a blog post?
Interesting, because in my OVH error logs I see a lot of ModSecurity rules “Request Missing a User Agent Header” with automatic 403s.
I wonder if this change in behavior on the “stable” shared hosting also disrupts some Google Search Console / mobile Googlebot accesses, since GSC reports:
“Unable to reach robots.txt”
“Server connection error”
whereas curl tests with User-Agent Googlebot return a 200 response.
Good news. I've had this problem since this morning on all the URLs I'm checking. I should note that I created the GSC property 4 days ago. AnnickD1 have you taken any action to get it working again?
Hello, no I didn't do anything special. I made a new attempt this morning and it was fine. I then closed the ticket. Support sent me a message afterwards indicating that there had been an issue on the OVH side: "After further checks on our side, I can confirm that an incident affecting certain interactions with Googlebot was identified at the end of last week on the shared infrastructure. It is now marked as resolved by our technical teams."
I hope everything gets sorted out for you quickly.
Thanks for your response. I still have the error to this day. I just created a ticker myself as well, so ;(. Surprisingly, I have two sites on a shared hosting; Googlebot works on one but not the other ...
Hey @JulienA34 Did you ever get a helpful response to that new ticket you opened after the global incident was marked resolved? Or is support just pointing everyone back to the closed incident link?
I opened a support request on Saturday with OVH but we have to wait until the end of the Pentecost weekend.
Did you ever get a helpful response to that new ticket you opened after the global incident was marked resolved? 
