What sort of site have you got installed here?

Is it a blog, or a standard HTML site..

Almost certainly the problem revolves around your .htaccess file..

Ask your host to look at that, or failing thgat, give some more details here and I'm sure a few of use can help you out..

Take care

Bruce

Jeff..

Maybe, its some plugin or somehting like that that is causing the problem. Assuming your hosting company is telling you the truth!

You can always check your web stats and see how much bandwidth you've used over the past month and judge for yourself..

Anyway, that doesn't fix your problem..

I suggest you un-activate all plugins that you have running, one by one, and see if thatfixes the problem..

If not, then I suggest you back up everything off your server, backup your mysql database, delete everything on the host and start again..

Sometimes this fixes.. I reckon you've got about a 20-50% chance that this is going to work for you, but atleast you won't have lost everything..

Failing that, changes hosts.. Thats all I can suggest..

Sorry I can't be of much more help..

Take care and best of luck with your site

Bruce

jsanderz,

I have to agree with you. I doubt you're using too many resources. How long as this site been active? Did this just start happening one day, or were you updating the site's code? Or, is this a new site you're setting up?

My take: The 500 error is from the web server trying to display another (different) ErrorDocument. In other words, something caused an error, the web server started looking for the specific ErrorDocument for that error and didn't find it so it defaults back to a 500 error. I could be wrong, but it certainly wouldn't be the first time I've seen something exactly like this. If you reread the error you might see what I'm talking about.

500 errors are usually from a server misconfiguration. That doesn't mean your web site's code can cause it, but its much less likely. Bruce could be right about the .htaccess file. They can cause 500 errors too. The .htaccess file would be considered a server configuration file.

Gary

Well......

Looks like I didn't answer in time. LOL

I see now there is a different error, but now it could just be that you aren't finished uploading the backup of your site.

Let us know when you get it uploaded and if it works of not.

I see you are still having problems....

Assuming that the files are actually on the server.... Now it looks like a .htaccess problem. I just had the same problem a couple days ago.

Are you manually installing wordpress or using their one click installer?

Hey Jeff, I feel your pain on this one! I had some sites hosted with Dreamhost a while ago, and still keep some non-business related sites there. I moved anything important off to a more robust setup about 18 months ago.

I found that scripts that behaved perfectly on other machines just refused to run on Dreamhost. They have a process watcher that gives you very little access to resources. Scripts can run for a very short amount of time before they get terminated.

I hope you get this sorted. I remember reading somewhere that one Dreamhost user managed to get them to swap his site onto a less busy server and his blog worked fine since then. Could be worth asking nicely if there's anywhere they could move you to?

Jeff, what is the exact plugin that is causing the trouble?

It can be just a miss configured plugin, doesn't have to be a bad one.

A serious host wouldn't have a configuration where too many things could cause an "Internal Server Error"! It's up to you to decide whether you change your host, if you pay above average you can find a better service.

I have many shared hosting accounts at different places. Some of these hostings gave me "Internal Server Error" but in all cases it was because I didn't set the folder rights properly, or my script had errors.

There is a way to get more information when an "Internal Server Error" happens. Log in to the Cpanel right after it happens and read the error log.

Jeff..

Check you server stats, via cPanel.

If you look at AWSTATS there is a bit that shows you the bandwidth used by various incoming IP addresses.. Check this out, if IP address is using all your bandwidth, then simply ban that IP address via cPanel..

A couple of years ago, I had excite.jp pull 2GB of bandwidth on one of my sites within just a month.. Excite.JP - who cares about them, so their IP got banned, and bandwidth usage plummeted..

Worth checking into..
Hope this helps

Bruce

Hello..

The problem of getting 500 Internal Server Error with Dreamhost is making me mad! Check discussion.dreamhost.com [under general troubleshooting topic] and I hope you will get the picture.

I start using Dreamhost a few weeks ago, and get this error so many times already, very frustrating. I have two sites running with Gallery2 and php-fusion cms.. and they both have this error many times. I have transfer one site from other hosting company to dreamhost and get this error right from the start.. i never have this error in the previous hosting before(4yrs!)

If this is a Wordpress blog I have a few suggestions that will lower your CPU/memory usage a bit:

1) If you haven't already, upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress (at the time of this writing, 2.7.1 but 2.8 is right around the corner).

2) Disable any plugins you don't need. A few that are usually safe to keep (they don't cause much server load): all in one seo pack, google analyticator, akismet, google xml sitemaps, wp-recaptcha

3) Install the wp super cache plugin and configure it to serve cached pages whenever possible. Cached pages are actual .html files (your php code doesn't get executed at all if you configure it properly) and should cause almost zero server load.

4) Install the gd press tools plugin and optimize your database. You'll probably be surprised to see how much "overhead" there is in your database and this can cause extra server load (along with taking more time for wordpress to find things in the database). There are also some other "advanced" and "performance" settings in this plugin that you might want to tune, perhaps with the help of your server administrator unless you really know what you're doing, but personally I just use this plugin to keep my database optimized.

Hey Jeff,

You mean to tell me 6 months later and you're still having problems with
WordPress on DreamHost? If so, you REALLY need to simply find a better
host. Steven has some good points, but you should have a good host that
isn't so limiting on your account(s).

Good Luck!

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The nice thing is, once you get around to upgrading Wordpress to the latest version, you should never have to download the latest version and manually upgrade that blog again. Wordpress has one-click upgrade in the dashboard now (not 100% sure what version introduced this feature, I think it was 2.7 or 2.7.1).

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