Are your website visitors only seeing the 500 server error? As an operator, you should tackle the problem quickly because not only will this scare off your visitors, but it could also mean that Google will lower your ranking. Before you take action, first check whether your server is still running. If not, contact your hosting provider as soon as possible.
If there is an internal error, the first step is to view the log files. For Linux servers, the collection of error messages should be found at /var/log/httpd/error_log. It makes sense to reload the website to reproduce the HTTP error 500 code and observe how the log file is being created. This will help you find the source of the error quite quickly. Also consider which changes were made shortly before. In many cases, incorrectly programmed or incompatible plugins are the cause of error messages.
Errors can also occur if you have not set permissions correctly for important files. In general, there are three types of rights:
- Read (r)
- Write (w)
- Execute (x)
These permissions can be assigned for three different user types:
- Owner of the file
- Group of users
- All others
The rights are specified either in the abbreviations r, w, and x, or in corresponding numerical values: 4 for read, 2 for write, and 1 for execute. They are added for each user type and specified one after the other: rwxr-xr-x (rwx for the owner, r-x for the group, and r-x for all others) or 755. This configuration (755) should be the default setting. If the permission assignment is set differently, an error may occur. You can change this with a command: