So, I’ve had two other WordPress based sites that have been out of commission for several days. Afterburn SF and Tuskaloosan are two blogs that I operate. Starting mid-week last week they started reporting 500 errors. This meant there was a problem on my web hosting server. The odd thing was that this site, NatThompson.com, and others that I operate in the same hosting environment were working with no problem.
I applied all the latest patches from my application administration console to no avail. Both sites kept returning the same error. I was scratching my head and beginning to get frustrated.
I decided to start checking the actual files themselves to see if there was some sort of corruption that had occurred. I fired up my trusty FTP Client, FileZilla, and started browsing through the files. Right away I noticed a file that looked out of place, web.config. In my experience this file is geared towards ASP.Net web sites and not PHP sites.
I figured I had done something silly and accidentally uploaded this file to the server. I deleted it and lo and behold the site started working again.
Thinking I had permanently resolved the issue I went about making some changes to the site. After a few minutes I decided to check the permalinks settings page. As soon as I did and tried to navigate away from it the site was back to throwing 500 errors.
I checked the FTP client and web.config was back!
At this point I began to fear a hacking incident. I deleted the file and waited for it to return. After a few minutes it had not reappeared and I went back to editing the site. That’s when I noticed that links to pages and posts were not working either. Whenever I clicked on one of them I got a 404 error indicating that the resource I was looking for could not be found.
I figured there must be a problem with the URL translation for permalinks so I went to the page to adjust them. I click the “Save” button and Wham! 500 error.
Checking FileZilla web.config is back. A brief bit of googling later and I come to several help requests involving word press, GoDaddy (my hosting provider), and “pretty URLs”. The long and short of it came down to an incompatibility in the level of hosting plan I have and the Rewrite URL module WordPress uses for translating URLs.
Getting the default setting back was a bit of an adventure as well. As soon as the permalinks page loaded the web.config file was created by WordPress. I had to load the page, delete the web.config file in FileZilla, set the default and then save the changes. Then repeat for the second site.
Whew!
Finally all is well. Hopefully there will be full support of this module from GoDaddy in the future. For now I’m just happy to have both sites up and running again.
