.htaccess File Causes 500 Internal Server Error on Network Solutions

How’s that for a search engine friendly title, eh?

This is just a quick note for anyone who has to deal with Network Solutions hosting (for clients or otherwise). Apperantly Network Solutions doesn’t run PHP with Apache’s mod_php, but rather as a CGI application. That means if you try to put PHP configuration directives in a .htaccess file it will cause a 500 Internal Server Error. My helpful reference: Because Network Solutions Sucks.

You have been warned.

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February 21, 2009 | Filed Under Work | Tagged , , , ,  

Comments

8 Responses to “.htaccess File Causes 500 Internal Server Error on Network Solutions”

  1. Janis on March 25th, 2009 8:18 am

    First up on google – well done. We’re getting a 500 internal server error on our site quite frequently since switching to a linux server on Fasthosts. They say it’s a prob with our scripts but the prob seems so random we can’t figure out what prob could actually be. A thought – if you have nothing at all in the htaccess file (our tecchies haven’t gotten around to it) could this be what’s causing the probs?

  2. Sean Murphy on March 25th, 2009 10:26 am

    Janis,

    There are a number of things that can cause an internal server error, but if you have nothing in your .htaccess file it likely isn’t the problem. If your host allows it, I would make sure you have Apache error logging turned on. The error logs generally give you much more information about the actual problem, opposed to the generic 500 error document. You’ll probably also want to look at the error logs for whatever scripts you’re running (PHP, Perl, etc).

  3. Janis on April 2nd, 2009 6:36 am

    Hmmm… OK we have tried literally everything we can think of, including moving to a new linux server (w same hosts). We are now getting 500 ISEs even when trying to load a purely HTML index page. The error log shows the exact same messages as when there was php on the page: FastCGI: comm with (dynamic) server “/var/www/fcgi/php-cgi” aborted: (first read) idle timeout (30 sec) and FastCGI: incomplete headers (0 bytes) received from server “/var/www/fcgi/php-cgi”. Apparently other sites on the same server are not affected. Also, this problem only came up after switch to Linux. Any clues?

  4. Sean Murphy on April 3rd, 2009 11:57 am

    You might like to read this: http://expressionengine.com/forums/viewthread/106390/#541782

    From what I have read, your problem could be from the way your scripts handle database connections, or that your host is killing FastCGI processes when it shouldn’t be. Either way, your host should be able to help you fix the problem, and if they can’t you should consider switching hosts.

  5. Kevin on September 9th, 2009 2:54 pm

    I’ve had some problems with this as well.

    Ended up finding two reasons it didn’t work, because I CREATED the file instead of editing it:

    1) Upload in ASCII mode
    2) Save .htaccess file coded as ANSI

    Hope this helps someone :)

  6. Sean Murphy on September 9th, 2009 3:09 pm

    Awesome, thanks for sharing!

  7. web tutorials on September 17th, 2009 10:55 am

    great info, got it to work finally.

  8. Harley Stevens on April 11th, 2011 10:42 pm

    Thanks for sharing this. For beginners like me, it is very helpful.

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