The Jetpack server was unable to communicate with your site

The Jetpack server was unable to communicate with your site: Unable to successfully activate Jetpack on a WordPress installation.

I’m having issues activating Jetpack on my WordPress site, I get the following error message:

Your website needs to be publicly accessible to use Jetpack: site_inaccessible

Error Details: The Jetpack server was unable to communicate with your site [IXR -32300: transport error: http_request_failed Operation timed out after 15000 milliseconds with 0 bytes received]

or the newer version:

Your website needs to be publicly accessible to use Jetpack: site_inaccessible

Error Details: The Jetpack server was unable to communicate with your site http://technology.bauzas.com [IXR -32300: transport error: http_request_failed Operation timed out after 15171 milliseconds with 0 out of -1 bytes received]

or in Spanish:

Tu sitio necesita ser público para utilizar Jetpack: site_inaccessible

Detalles del error: The Jetpack server was unable to communicate with your site http://yoursite.bauzas.com [IXR -32300: transport error: http_request_failed Operation timed out after 15173 milliseconds with 0 out of -1 bytes received]

Any thoughts? I’ve read online and tried using a standard theme and reinstalling the Jetpack.

Approaches already tried:

• Using the out of the box theme
• Enabling XMLRPC.php
• Deactivating and deleting the jetpack plugin

UPDATE:

I spoke with support at Automatic and was able to identify the issues pertaining the activation process. Unfortunately it seems that my host’s configuration limits my ability to use Jetpack but there is a workaround that works in my case. Below is the response from Jetpack’s authors:

I got some information back from our team for you. Can you please check with your host and ask about the PHP configuration? Your host will need to look at the PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN setting and increase the setting from 1 to 2.

It turns out my host only allows 1 FCGI process. The follow up from the support team regarding the limitation was the following:

After checking with my team, it appears that since the PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN setting is necessary you’ll have to have a host that supports that in order to use Jetpack.

For a list of hosts that will work with this setting you can go to:

http://get.wp.com/hosting

My solution:

It turns out I didn’t particularly wanted to move to a different host so I figured a way to enable Jetpack with a bit of work but thus far it seems to be effective.

1. Secure another host that supports Jetpack. In my case I setup a Windows Box to host my site temporarily. We shall call this from now on the Alternate Host.
2. Once you have your environment setup properly, transfer all your files from your host to the Alternate Host.
3. Visit your site on the Alternate Host. You might need to setup your Hosts file so that traffic to your site is resolved to your Alternate Host.
4. Now because either you host the site or a third party that supports Jetpack you should be able to complete the activation process.
5. Because the database remains on your original host (I am assuming that you can access it from anywhere, otherwise you have to transfer it as well) the activation should be completed on the original host as well. Because Jetpack changes constantly I still transfer back all my files from my Alternate Host back to my original host so that if there happens to be a change in the file system I don’t miss it.
6. Voilà! It works!

Hope this helps anyone trying to get Jetpack running on their WordPress installation.

Update 2:

It was mentioned in a comment below that using php 5.2 instead of 5.3 resolved this issue. Anyone else tried this approach? I am currently using php versión 5.5 and downgrading to version 5.2 did not resolve my issue.