When you have made changes to the Direct Admin or you simply have to restart the DirectAdmin service, you can restart the DirectAdmin service manually. In my case, I was no longer able to connect to my server (by default, the server is accessible by going to serverip:2222 in your browser). Use one of these commands to restart the DA service:

service directadmin restart

or

/etc/init.d/directadmin restart

However, you might see the following error message when performing this command on SSH:

Stopping DirectAdmin: [FAILED]
Starting DirectAdmin: [ OK ]

This means stopping the DirectAdmin service failed. This can be due to various reasons. Time to investigate.

The best thing you can do is to probably check your server’s error logs on the reason behind the fact that this action failed. A log file mostly contains very useful information to effectively troubleshoot this issue.

Check your error log with this command:

tail /var/log/directadmin/error.log

The tail command will show the latest lines of the error.log file located on /var/log/diractadmin/. In my specific case, I received errors related to the SSL connection of my host:

2015:05:25-00:08:06: Error Loading ssl_cipher: AES128+EECDH:AES128+EDH

I now know what caused the problem and I am able to fix it!