Code-Red

I bet you guys get a lot of these, but I didn't know where to look. I'm panicking right now because I'm getting about 100 different people telling me my site is down. I'm new to domains and forum hosting so please bear with me.

I've got a chatbox on my forum, and it slows down my site every now and then when there are a good number of users on. Tonight, it slowed the site to a crawl, and when I went to refresh, I got a Internal Server Error 500. Usually these pop up every now and then, but they are temporary. It's not going on half an hour and it still hasnt gone away, so I figured I'd check my error logs.

Well, they dont really tell ME anything. I see a bunch of Windows/Apache/Linux/Mozilla/STE CLR/ and other miscellaneous stuff that means nothing to me really... could someone possibly guide me as to what I should be looking for?

I haven't made any changed to the site in a number of days, be it permissions or page edits. So I can't for the life of me figure it out.

Thanks

rmathus

The most common issue that occurs where there's an internal server error is modifying an .htaccess file incorrectly in which case the Apache error logs would state something along those lines. If you have not edited that recently then that is not the cause. Another common cause is if you are exceeding the limits set for your site as determined by the server. Your host can recommend more on that but perhaps running an optimization of the MySQL database can help with performance issues.

In the end, you will definitely want to check the server error logs for more specific information.

-Ryan M.