500 Internal Server Error?

[tea_and_toast]

I know I need to change my site to 1.5 but at the minute it's going to have to stay with 1.0 until I find the time to swap it. I'm having a problem where the server keeps timing out. This is happening at least once a day. It's our school website and doesn't look good to the parents. It's also very slow at loading when it does actually load. The error I get is below. Can anyone help? Thank you!


500 Internal Server Error
Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, *email address* and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

[Messa]

Usually this is to do with either incorrect permissions or using php_ in .htaccess.

Is suPHP installed on the server?

[tea_and_toast]

Hello, at the minute my hosting company are saying that the server my current database is on is overloaded and is causing a lot of problems. They've sent me details on how to transfer to a new database, which is causing me a headache. But hopefully this will solve my problem...

The 500 error only comes up every so often, do you think it's more likely to be a server problem rather than an htaccess problem like you suggest? I'm willing to look at htaccess but don't want to start messing about with it if its ok. The site didn't have any problems until about 3 months ago.

[Edu-IT]

What problems are you having with the database move?

[mossj]

Could you pm the address of the site? I have a suspician i would like to test before I make a big noise over it.

[tea_and_toast]

Edu-IT, my problem is that I don't seem to be able to make a connection using the SSH. I'm on a mac with snow leopard and I'm not sure if this is causing the problem, but it just won't connect. Mossj, I'll pm you now, thank you!

[EduTech]

The operating system should not be a problem, you should be able to ssh on to weather your using snow leopard or a windows os.

another PM on way lol

James.

[tea_and_toast]

Thanks so much everyone for the help! I'm waiting for my hosting company to get back to me now as there seems to be a problem with the ssh details they've given me. EduTech has been a great help trying to figure out the problem so far. I'll let you know how I get on, thanks again!

[tea_and_toast]

It appears most of the problem here was caused by the hosting company... not me, thankfully. I've managed to import my database to the new server and it seems to be functioning fine. My only (and hopefully last!) question is: I have changed the database details within administrator to reflect the new database (ie: changed the host ip address, username etc) but the changes I have made subsequently are not reflected on the site. Will it just take a while for the new database to become associated with the site? Or should I be doing something else?

[tea_and_toast]

Please ignore my last post... it seems the site and database just needed half an hour to find each other! All working now, phew! Thanks once again to Edu-Tech for his great help through PMs.

[EduTech]

It's been a Pleasure Hopefully you wont have to do that again in a hurry.

have a great evening, put your feet up and have a rest hehe

James.