My bread and butter site has been dead for who knows how long. All pages returning error 500s because Hostgator updated their php and for some reason it broke my site. Once I manually updated the preferred php in the cpanel it magically worked again. Then another site was completely deleted. Luckily I keep mirrored local sites. Just a heads up! Hopefully google doesn’t penalize me for those error 500s. Been SEOing the crap out of that thing for 10 years. I’m sure that little fubar trick set me back a bit.
They did send out advanced notice by email that they were upgrading the default version of PHP from 5.2 to 5.4 and included a link to their page where they advise how to select which PHP version you want to use (5.2, 5.3, 5.4, 5.5) if you don’t want the default. There was plenty of time to either fix any PHP 5.2 code that wouldn’t work in 5.4 or to reset your selected version.
I don’t have any idea why that would result in returning 500 though. Are you sure the two things are related?
Sorry to hear that about your bread and butter site. Technology changes quickly and web hosting services perform upgrades to bring you a better experience. Unfortunately it can cause issues with some websites. Keep an eye on your website, especially if it is your bread and butter site. When you see something wrong if you have a good provider they are there around the clock to help you get it resolved. The level of support a web hosting company provides is an important aspect of the service to consider.
In this particular case - if upgrading the PHP was going to break the site then a simple one line change to specify the PHP version as explained in the email would have kept the site operating on 5.2 even with the change in the default.
I thought it rather funny when I received the email from Hostgator saying that they were changing the default as I had just that minute finished following the instructions to switch from the 5.2 default to 5.4 so that their changing the default had become irrelevant.
Ya I got that but ignored it. Something was amiss. once I went in the back end and changed it from 5.2 to 5.5 it worked. It was the single line in my htaccess that made HTML ext be able to run php. Once I removed that the site showed up but showed up broke cuz all the php was gone. But once I made it 5.5 the line was fine. Basically I don’t think the update went smoothly in my account.
that’s why I prefer VPS instead of web hosting