This weekend I didn’t have much time to write on this blog. One reason is because of parties and the other is the sheer amount of work I had to perform. Apart from electronics failing left, right and centre a site I am working on failed this week for no apparent reason.
The site uses wordpress where I was creating a theme and some custom widgets and applications. I wasn’t working on it when the Internal server error occurred. I immediately went onto Google for the solution, what any experienced trouble-shooter would do. My search immediately lead to a problem between wordpress and my webhost, GoDaddy Shared Windows hosting.
I started by removing all the plug-ins as some people did to fix the problem. This had no effect on the error. I changed the theme name to try force wordpress to use the default theme and Houston we still have a problem. I even resorted to emailing customer support of GoDaddy but they were as helpful as most customer support around the world. Completely useless.
After some thinking and debugging I noticed the web.config which in the subdirectory which I never created. I decided to rename it and presto the site was back up and running like nothing ever happened. Hopefully this little piece of information will find its way onto Google so that if someone has the same problem as I did would be able to notice and fix the problem quicker than I did. Since I wasted a few hours on this problem.
This problem occured on a site I am developing but I was worried that my site would crash too since I was using wordpress too. So it was very important I solved the problem just in case this site decided to bite the dust too. At least now I am more confident that I can fix the site quickly. I don’t want anyone not to be able to read my crazy thoughts for a day.
#1 by WP Themes on February 21, 2010 - 10:41 am
Nice dispatch and this mail helped me alot in my college assignement. Say thank you you for your information.
#2 by Malcolm Micallef on February 23, 2010 - 10:46 am
no problem. I’m glad it helped.
#3 by ruch on March 18, 2010 - 4:01 pm
Hi Malcolm
Having the same problems with my wordpress site. Could you tell me where to find this web.config file? And what do I need to rename the web.config file or the sub directory?
thanks a lot!
#4 by Malcolm Micallef on March 18, 2010 - 4:59 pm
Hello Ruch
This didn’t completely solve the internal server error but allows you to to gain access back into your site. I went on your site and it is giving that error everywhere. If you FTP into the main directory where your wordpress site is installed you should find a file called web.config. You can either delete the file or you can rename the file so like this you can restore the file. You can rename it to anything. I usually place a number in the file name so it becomes web.config2.
This should allow you access back into your site. The error was caused be I had changed the permalink settings. I noticed that on my host I can only have one working site which uses custom permalinks.
I hope this helped. If you still have problems feel free to contact me.
Malcolm
#5 by ruch on March 18, 2010 - 11:21 pm
Thanks Malcolm! Spoke to GoDaddy and they got it working for me. Will keep your trick in mind for future problems..cheers!
#6 by Malcolm Micallef on March 19, 2010 - 12:26 am
np Ruch. Keep me informed on the problem maybe I one day I can completely solve the problem and host more than one wordpress site on one account.