Title: Website down with 500 Internal Server Error
Last modified: August 31, 2016

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# Website down with 500 Internal Server Error

 *  Resolved [cliffmama](https://wordpress.org/support/users/cliffmama/)
 * (@cliffmama)
 * [10 years, 4 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/website-down-with-500-internal-server-error/)
 * Recently upgraded to WordPress 4.4.1 a couple of days ago. Noticed my site was
   down today. [http://gunksclimbers.org](http://gunksclimbers.org)
    Going to the
   site returns: ———————————— Internal Server Error The server encountered an internal
   error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request. Please contact
   the server administrator at [webmaster@gunksclimbers.org](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/website-down-with-500-internal-server-error/webmaster@gunksclimbers.org?output_format=md)
   to inform them of the time this error occurred, and the actions you performed
   just before this error. More information about this error may be available in
   the server error log. Additionally, a 500 Internal Server Error error was encountered
   while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
 * ——————–
    So I looked around and read multiple articles on what to do.
 * I wasn’t able to login to WordPress. So I used FTP and renamed my .htaccess file.
   Then I was able to login to WordPress (although my site was still returning 500
   server error).
 * Once in WordPress, I deactivated all of my plugins, cleared the cache. Still 
   got 500 server error.
 * I also set the theme to the default theme. Still returned 500 server error.
 * Since then, I have returned my theme, .htaccess file and plugins to their previous
   state, since they didn’t identify or resolve the problem.
 * According the Google Webmaster Tools, the pages started returning crawl errors
   on 1/28/2016.
 * Any idea why my site is down and how I can get it working again? This is terrible!
   
   Thanks…

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

 *  [Mark Ratledge](https://wordpress.org/support/users/songdogtech/)
 * (@songdogtech)
 * [10 years, 4 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/website-down-with-500-internal-server-error/#post-7012383)
 * Contact your webhost; 500 errors are usualy server based and you can’t do much
   about them, and if you have made no changes to the site to cause them, there’s
   really nothing you can do; the host has to fix it.
 *  Thread Starter [cliffmama](https://wordpress.org/support/users/cliffmama/)
 * (@cliffmama)
 * [10 years, 4 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/website-down-with-500-internal-server-error/#post-7012460)
 * Turns out my hosting company upgraded to PHP 5.6 and my php.ini file used incompatible
   variables. This is frustrating because my site is a WordPress site and I know
   nothing of PHP, so how am I supposed to know it’s incompatible? Where does the
   php.ini get installed from, and how does it get upgraded to be compatible with
   whatever version of php is running?
 *  [Mark Ratledge](https://wordpress.org/support/users/songdogtech/)
 * (@songdogtech)
 * [10 years, 4 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/website-down-with-500-internal-server-error/#post-7012478)
 * The hosting company should be taking care of all that; most times, they have 
   a server wide php.ini they will update. Some hosts are worse than others.

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

The topic ‘Website down with 500 Internal Server Error’ is closed to new replies.

## Tags

 * [500 server error](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/500-server-error/)

 * In: [Fixing WordPress](https://wordpress.org/support/forum/how-to-and-troubleshooting/)
 * 3 replies
 * 2 participants
 * Last reply from: [Mark Ratledge](https://wordpress.org/support/users/songdogtech/)
 * Last activity: [10 years, 4 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/website-down-with-500-internal-server-error/#post-7012478)
 * Status: resolved

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