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Dealing With Internal Server Issues — When the web server coughs up error code 500

by Dave Doolin on March 26, 2009

(Reading time: 1 – 2 minutes)

Ever get one of these?

500 – Internal Server Error
This is a temporary server error.
Please try to reload the webpage later.

Check your server error log. If you are hosted with bluehost.com, you will be running the Apache server, and your error log* will look something like this:


[2009-03-18 12:02:37]: error: file is writable by others: (/home/howtopla/public_html/wordpress/wp-admin/tools.php)
[2009-03-18 11:59:09]: error: file is writable by others: (/home/howtopla/public_html/wordpress/wp-admin/update-core.php)

Wrong permissions will produce a 500 server error when using the new WordPress 2.7 automatic updating feature when update-core.php has file permissions 666 instead of 644.

Here’s two more examples:

  • wp-db-backup failed on wp-admin/tools.php permissions: had to change from 666 to 644.
  • 500 errors can also occur when using the automatic plugin installation feature of WordPress. In this case, ensure that wp-admin/index.php is set to 644.
*You can find the error.log file through the cPanel interface.


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Tagged as: 500 Server Error, File permissions

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