Wordpress and HTTP Error 500

Within the last few months, I've been experiencing this error more and more frequently:

"Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@<SITE> and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request."

Now just the other day, Wordpress was up, and working fine. Then today I get this error. I made no additions (no upgrades or new plugins) since it was last working.

Is this a server error, or is there really something up with my setup within Wordpress???

Thank you,
Joe Mac

In reply to:
Is this a server error, or is there really something up with my setup within Wordpress???

There's no difference. Internal server error means 99.9% of the time the browser didn't do anything wrong. It's just a vague message indicating the person running the web server software needs to investigate the problem.

So since you are that person here's how you investigate. You check the error log messages. You will have to use FTP or SFTP and download the log files from the /home/username/logs/domain/http directory. Starting keeping copies until this problem is resolved.

There are to separate files. error.log and access.log. Obviously you want to check the error.log and see what the message says. But you might want to cross reference the access.log to see what URL was visited, what User Agent was reported. Situations might be needing to cut off a search engine bot from DOS'ing your site, someone hotlinking, a particular Wordpress function malfunctioning, etc.

Customer since 2000 cool openvein.org

I had exactly the same issue in the last few days so was relieved to see I wasn't alone ;-)

I followed Atropos7 advice but did not see anything out of the order other than a few entries from a Russian website and IP addresses which resolve to DreamHost Abuse Team. WTF?

Anyway, I decided a restore was in order and following that all appears to be working OK this morning.

I looked at your site at http://laurensabine.net/ and after a few of the photos of the lovely Lauren, (she is delightful), also got thrown-off with an Internal Server Error.

Here is how to restore from the DreamHost backup:

Go to your panel at:
https://panel.dreamhost.com/
Log-In

Click-on 'Website Hosting'

Click-on 'Restore'

Check the required options

Click-on 'Restore laurensabine.net now!'

Good Luck!

Thanks both of you for the information. I looked in my server logs, and about the only thing I see is :

Wed Jul 22 02:49:02 2009] [error] [client 67.205.55.243] Premature end of script headers: <some php file>

The php file is mostly wp-cron, admin-ajax, and index.

I haven't yet tried the "restore". If support cannot find an issue, I'll try that next (since I'm unsure when to restore FROM!!).

joe

Wordpress and HTTP Error 500