My Last GoDaddy Horror Story
I was fortunate enough to get 99% of my web sites off of GoDaddy’s absolutely horrible Shared Hosting and over to my new server on Media Temples Grid. However I had no choice but to leave one of my clients websites behind on GoDaddy. I had a few reasons for this, this particular site was running Wordpress, vBulletin and a custom script that bridged the two CMS membership systems together. The script required many manual directory paths on the server, the site will expire soon after my clients promotion is over and i just couldn’t justify recoding all the directory paths and re-installing vBulletin on another server. So I left it behind.
I get a call the other day from this client telling me his site is giving a 500 Internal Server Error. So I check it out, narrowing the problem down to a corrupt .htaccess file. Further more narrowing down to these two lines in my root’s .htaccess file:
AddHandler x-httpd-php5 .php
AddHandler x-httpd-php .php4
These two lines were provided to me in the past by GoDaddy in order to use PHP version 5 in replace of the default PHP4 language. vBulletin as well as Wordpress prefer PHP5 (the latest version of PHP) so I needed a solution. After calling GoDaddy tech support, apparently they had made some adjustments on their Shared Hosting Servers that would render a 500 Internal Server Error when it runs them two lines meanwhile they give you the ability to select your preferred version of PHP with the Control Center.
- Login to your GoDaddy Account
- Hosting Account List > Open Control Panel
- Control Center > Content > Languages
- You will see two options under PHP Version: Select your desired version of PHP, in my case this was PHP5.X
The changes may take up to 24 hours, so don’t panic if your still having problems right away.
Tags: godaddy, php version, server error