How to avoid 500 error plus hosting advice

  • Widad

    (@jams36)


    10 years, 5 months ago

    Hi everyone,

    First of all I’m new here and this is my first post! So sorry if I’m posting in the wrong place!

    I need some advice concerning my wordpress blog. I have purchased a windows deluxe shared hosting with Godaddy. I have also purchased 3 domain names and they are all hosted in the same plan … so same ip. I’m using wordpress for all of them, 2 of these blogs are “under construction” and one is already active. I have been experiencing a lot of errors lately. Namely, “500 internal server error”! Everytime it happens I spend a whole day or more navigating forums to find a solution and Goddady support never helped. They only answer me after the problem has been resolved to say this: ” I have tested your site and was unable to duplicate any issues at this time….”

    Last time the error lasted for two entire days! I just gave up! couldn’t access the blog or the dashboard. Until I read somewhere that it may be because of the file “web.config” as I don’t have a .htaccess because I’m on a shared windows hosting plan. So I went on the FTP file manager in the root folder and just said to myself to hell with it and I deleted the web.config! and guess what?! No more errors everything was working fine! I have no idea what I did! I thought it could go either way!
    So can anyone here with more experience please explain to me the following points:

    1- What is this 500 error problem in my case? Do I just have to delete the web.config file everytime I get this 500 error? If I do, do I risk losing my blog or something?

    2- Is having 3 or 4 websites on the same hosting plan with the same IP (deluxe shared hosting in my case) a bad idea? In terms of SEO, etc..?

    3- Should I switch to a linux shared hosting with Godaddy to avoid these 500 errors in the long term? or Should I upgrade to another plan? I heard about Grid and VPS being better for wordpress hosting?

    P.S. I have wordpress multisite, the URL for the blog I’m concerned about the most is this one: http://lebuffetgourmand.com/blog/. (I also have an English version: http://lebuffetgourmand.com/blog-en/ )

    Hence, my blogs are in subfolders and of course my website would be: http://lebuffetgourmand.com/ (Still under construction).

    I hope I’m being clear here and not confusing you! I’m fairly new to all of this and have no web training at all so I’m trying my best here.

    Any advice/ return from you guys would be much appreciated!

    Best regards to all,

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Moderator cubecolour

    (@numeeja)

    10 years, 5 months ago

    1. Not enough information to be able to tell for sure. 500 is a ‘catch-all’ error generated by the Web server meaning that something has gone wrong, but the server can not be more specific about the error condition. There may be a problem with your site causing this but if you are on a shared hosting plan it may even be possible for another site to bring down all sites on the server with a 500 error depending on how the server is configured. The server logs may provide some clues as to what has gone wrong.

    2. shouldn’t make any difference unless you are trying to fool google in some way.

    3. Switching to Linux hosting from windows hosting can make running a WordPress site more straightforward. Whether you stay with your current hosting company or look into moving to an alternative company is a decision you will need to make based on your experiences with them so far including how they have handled your support requests.

    You may want to try the multisite forum for any questions specific to multisite – http://wordpress.org/support/forum/multisite.

    Personally I would not use windows hosting for WordPress unless there was real & specific reason that meant windows had to be used, also I wouldn’t use shared hosting for a multisite installation unless it was very small with low traffic and unlikely to grow.

    Thread Starter Widad

    (@jams36)

    10 years, 5 months ago

    cubecolour Thank you a lot for your reply.

    “shouldn’t make any difference unless you are trying to fool google in some way”
    Actually all I want is to have my 3 websites grow in terms of traffic and visibility on search engines, so I was just wondering if it’s ok to have them all on the same hosting plan or if it’s better to buy a hosting plan for each one of them. So I’m not trying to fool google or anything of the sort.

    If I see that my traffic is growing I will certainly move to a dedicated hosting. For now I only have one blog running with a few visitors everyday and the other blogs are still under construction.

    Thanks again! 🙂

    Moderator cubecolour

    (@numeeja)

    10 years, 5 months ago

    Matt Cutts of google said that google does not penalise domains not hosted at their own dedicated IP here: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/myth-busting-virtual-hosts-vs-dedicated-ip-addresses/

    If you are using shared hosting, there will still be many sites at the same IP address even if you use three separate shared hosting accounts.

    Matt Cutts’s blog is worth following to keep up to date with developments at google from a site owner’s perspective – and it is running on WordPress even though google owns blogger.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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