Error 500

[kcfphoto]

I can't access my WordPress Admin panel anymore and get an error 500 message. My business website is down with the same error. I contacted Sonic Support and was told the server is reachable and that it is not their problem. I reached out to a web designer/host person that maintains a non-profit website I am affiliated with and he was unable to help even after accessing the files in my FTP directory. So I contacted the WordPress template company that makes my design template and they said it sounds like a PHP version issue:

"I was able to access your server via FTP with this new password. But I don't have any options in there for messing with the PHP configuration. I can't even get basic HTML files to display. So I'm afraid you need to contact Sonic for more help with this. If you come across some way to manipulate PHP versions or settings send that along. "

I realize Sonic is no longer offering hosting, I am NOT a web designer or hosting expert, I need a way to get at least my blog entries back, the rest I can rebuild. I have been with Sonic since Dane got out of SRJC and started Sonic, this has been a huge let down. Something like this has happened before in 2014 and Sonic Support finally stepped up and helped. l am hoping Sonic will step up one more time before I take my business elsewhere.

[joemuller]

Hi,

This one took quite a bit of digging, but I finally was able to find the error. Your 'All-in-One SEO Sitemap' plugin added a line to the .htaccess file that our server didn't like:

[Fri Jun 23 16:07:34 2023] [alert] [client *redacted*] /nfs/WWW_pages/kcfphoto/keithflood.com/.htaccess: RewriteRule: cannot compile regular expression 'sitemap(|[0-9]+)\\.xml$'\n

I've commented out the rule in question, but you'll probably want to disable the Sitemap part of the the All-in-One SEO plugin(s). In my experience, the developers of SEO plugins tend to forget to test on older systems, so they may end up breaking sites like yours which are hosted on older web hosting software/hardware. (In this case, it's older versions of Apache Web Server.)

Your website should now be back up and functioning, though as I mentioned above, I recommend disabling at least the sitemap feature of the plugin to make sure it doesn't try to sneak the broken line back into the .htaccess file for your site.

-- Joe M
Sonic System Operations

[kcfphoto]

THANK YOU Joe! I wish phone support was able to do a bit more or point me in the right direction but I do appreciate your help and now I can migrate my site and not have to start from scratch after 10+ years of blog entries etc.