Laravel 5.4 gives Wrong COM_STMT_PREPARE response size

I'm working on a website and it worked fine the past month, suddenly yesterday it crashed and says Wrong COM_STMT_PREPARE response size. Received 7.

This is my code in the controller:

public function newsFeed()
{
    // get all data needed for the news page

    try{

        $news = DB::SELECT("SELECT 
                                n.newId
                                ,n.title_en
                                ,n.title_es
                                ,n.description_en
                                ,n.description_es
                                ,n.newMainImg
                                ,n.tags
                                ,DATE_FORMAT(n.createDate, '%b - %e - %Y') as publishDate_en
                                ,DATE_FORMAT(n.createDate, '%e - %b - %Y') as publishDate_es
                                ,concat(u.firstName,' ',u.lastName) as author
                            FROM NEWS n
                              inner join USERS u
                                      on u.userId = n.author
                                     and u.statusId = 1
                            order by n.createDate desc limit 20"); 


        $favorites = DB::SELECT("SELECT 
                                    n.newId
                                    ,n.title_en
                                    ,n.title_es
                                    ,n.newMainImg
                                FROM
                                    NEWS n
                                WHERE viewsCount > 0
                                  and viewsCount is not null
                                order by viewsCount desc limit 6");


        $data = array(
            'news' => $news,
            'favorites' => $favorites
        );

        return view('news/newsFeed')->with('data', $data);

    }catch(Exception $exc){

        echo $exc->getMessage();
    }      

}

I haven't found any solution. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

UPDATE:

If it helps the server is in 000webhost, I've seen that many people is having the same issue.

UPDATE 2

The error says the problem is in Connection.php line 647

This is the code around that:

protected function run($query, $bindings, Closure $callback)
{
    $this->reconnectIfMissingConnection();

    $start = microtime(true);

    // Here we will run this query. If an exception occurs we'll determine if it was
    // caused by a connection that has been lost. If that is the cause, we'll try
    // to re-establish connection and re-run the query with a fresh connection.
    try {
        $result = $this->runQueryCallback($query, $bindings, $callback);
    } catch (QueryException $e) {
        $result = $this->handleQueryException(
            $e, $query, $bindings, $callback
        );
    }

    // Once we have run the query we will calculate the time that it took to run and
    // then log the query, bindings, and execution time so we will report them on
    // the event that the developer needs them. We'll log time in milliseconds.
    $this->logQuery(
        $query, $bindings, $this->getElapsedTime($start)
    );

    return $result;
}

and

protected function runQueryCallback($query, $bindings, Closure $callback)
{
    // To execute the statement, we'll simply call the callback, which will actually
    // run the SQL against the PDO connection. Then we can calculate the time it
    // took to execute and log the query SQL, bindings and time in our memory.
    try {
        $result = $callback($query, $bindings);
    }

    // If an exception occurs when attempting to run a query, we'll format the error
    // message to include the bindings with SQL, which will make this exception a
    // lot more helpful to the developer instead of just the database's errors.
    catch (Exception $e) {
        throw new QueryException(
            $query, $this->prepareBindings($bindings), $e
        );
    }

    return $result;
}