500 Internal Server Errors

We’ve gotten a flood of reports of 500 Internal Server Errors and have tracked down the cause!

We are upgrading a couple of packages and it’s causing php to break momentarily. For some reason when we rolled out the package last week to our “frisky” cluster, none of this happened, so we went ahead and pushed it out to everything today. Unfortunately, that’s causing some breakage while the new packages are being installed, and we are taking steps to prevent it from happening while we upgrade the rest of the servers.

What we thought was going to be a seamless upgrade turns out to be not so seamless. Rest assured that if we had known it was going to cause any downtime, we would have scheduled this for late night (PST), and warned everyone well in advance.

We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.

Sincerely,
The Happy DreamHost BreakStuff Robot.

.

59 Responses to “500 Internal Server Errors”

  1. Kyle Says:

    Why is this being listed as resolved?

    I’m sure everyone’s working on it and I’m a happy DreamHost customer, but it shouldn’t be listed as resolved just yet…

  2. Jeff Says:

    Can you define the Resovled statuses? To me, “Resolved:Yes” means the problem has been solved, which it hasn’t due to the obvious fact that I’m still getting a 500 error.

  3. CBW Says:

    Thanks for the speedy update. I was uploading new versions of my database and thought I broke something until I tried my other domains. Hopefully we will be back to normal soon.

  4. jon Says:

    Did the cluster you tried this on actually have any websites on it? :)

  5. David Says:

    Resolved means all is working, but all my sites are down. * Gotta go look up the word “resolved”, be right back….

  6. Clare Says:

    And here I thought I was going to have to start restoring stuff. Glad that I don’t!

    Thanks for the update.

  7. Reed Says:

    This is a problem. It says resolved. Clearly the problem has not been resolved, because I am still getting the error. I had a crows of 150 to control through our blogging account, while all of them are freaking out. “The site is messed! Help me, Reed! The site is messed!”

  8. Luciana Says:

    As the other people who posted, not sure why it says resolved since my site is still down.

  9. Mitchell Hashimoto Says:

    For my websites it was revolved but it did leave a few permissions on my files incorrect. I just changed this back to what they were (3 or 4 permissions) and everything is running great :)

  10. David Says:

    Yep, just looked up resolved and it does not mean that everything is still screwed up. You guys might want to change it to “things are still screwed up” or ” we really shouldn’t have done this change in the middle of the day during the week”…I dont know…

  11. Arash Says:

    You guys really should have planned this better. Why risk it during the day?

  12. Ben Brown Says:

    Wow, this is only like the 10th time my site has gone totally batshit insane because of something you guys didn’t think was going to be a problem. Maybe you should start doing ALL of your maintenance in the middle of the night instead of just the things you KNOW are going to fuck out and screw everything up.

  13. Ben Brown Says:

    I’m really happy that my site got a bunch of press today and all of our new visitors are getting a 500 error. The least you guys could do is put up a DREAMHOST FUCKED UP page on the effected servers.

  14. Reed Says:

    Oooh, good idea! Because again, we had to use our blog, while only half of our members know the address, meaning half of them are still freaking out and emailing me 40 times and then wondering why I’m not responding.

  15. Robyn Says:

    I am upset that this post says this issue is resolved but neither of my domains is working properly due to this error. It is clearly not resolved. Fix your status notice at least, for goodness sake. And fix my domains too please.

  16. Justin Says:

    How long is this going to take?! Saying “Resolved: Yes” while everything has been down for an hour annoys me…

  17. hustler Says:

    Wassup with this? Commonnnn Dreamhostttttttttttttt….

  18. Momo the Monster Says:

    VJ Kung Fu is back online. Woot!

  19. David Says:

    Alright, still down but yet still resolved….yeeeeehaw!

  20. Matias Says:

    the issue is NOT resolved. I agree with everyone else, “Resolved: Yes” meas nothing, they are just empty words. I still have a GLARING “500 Internal Server Error” on my clients page!!!!!!!!!!

  21. Reed Says:

    Yes! TheNeoverse.net is sucessfully back online!

  22. Jue Says:

    Not resolved here either. Also, it wasn’t just phpbb on my site, it is everything!!!!!

  23. David Pan Says:

    NOT resolved.

  24. Andrew Says:

    I wish I could program the “Happy DreamHost BreakStuff Robot.” I’d be real swell at it!

  25. David Pan Says:

    chmod 644 . done.

  26. anima Says:

    yes, chmod works. but dammit, its a lot of work to do on all sites!

  27. Luna Says:

    I do appreciate you posting about this, but I echo other’s statements that “Resolved” means it’s fixed. I’m no longer getting the 500 error, but my forums can’t find anything in the database, and is trying to re-install my forum.

    This is quite frustrating…

  28. Fennec Says:

    Obligatory.

    500 internal server errors?
    That’s a lot of errors!

  29. Chas Says:

    Also obligatory.

    “Resolved.”

    I do not think this word means what you think it means.

    Of course, I’m no longer getting a 500 internal error message. Rather a fatal error message. Somehow that doesn’t seem like the situation has improved.

  30. Jenny Says:

    Good to know! When our website went 500, I was in the middle of trying out this complicated regexp filter, and I thought I had somehow crashed the server. Yikes — it was a tense few minutes until life returned — so glad it was unrelated.

  31. jon Says:

    Can someone explain what the chmod 644 comments mean? Is this something we can fix ourselves?

  32. Joe Says:

    Setting permissions to 644 isn’t a real solution. The files that wordpress (in my case) is complaining about really should not be world readable, and it looks like wp-cache would now require world write permission on the cache directory. No good!

  33. jon Says:

    But the error my site is getting is:

    [Mon Jun 18 18:49:14 2007] [error] [client 66.249.65.144] Premature end of script headers: /dh/cgi-system/php.cgi

    To me, this just looks like one of the standard PHP header files is screwed. How could changing permissions on my site affect this? Or are other people getting different errors?

  34. Doug Says:

    Shall I call anyone a waaaaambulance?

  35. Kyle Says:

    Appears to be resolved now.

  36. Eric Says:

    Please empty the /tmp directory on sepulveda. Thanks. (Yes I also did a support ticket)

  37. realyst Says:

    500 Internal Server Errors?

    That’s a lotta errors! I woulda probably noticed something going on after #350!!!

    I kid, I kid ;)

  38. Daniel Nicolas Says:

    Thanks for the update. I thought it was me, but it wasn’t anything I could see so I waited.

    Very glad there’s a Dreamhost Status blog for stuff like this. My old host had nothing and would go down and up without a peep.

  39. rel0ad Says:

    PHP Memory setting went from 90mb to 8mb with out warning, and when I contact support they
    tell me to compile PHP myself. 8mb is the default. and they don’t change the global settings.(bs)

    bah, alot of stuff will NOT run with 8mb anymore. I cant believe all of those one click installs will run correctly.

  40. Web Host Advisor Says:

    PHP Memory setting went from 90mb to 8mb

    As far as I know, the PHP memory limit has been 8mb for a long time, I compiled my own php to get over the memory limit a good 18 months ago, so I’m fairly sure 8mb is the norm.

  41. rel0ad Says:

    here is a screen shot of version 4.4.7, also take a look at the php5 settings, that 90mb too

    http://php.dreamhosters.com/php4-cgi/

    8mb is not the norm, that has been the php default setting for years,
    and everything has changed thats why everyone changes that setting.

    8mb aint squat

  42. ugh Says:

    there must be something wrong with yoohoo web server: ftp, ssh, … OK but lots of 503 on websites and VEEERY SLOW

  43. PR Says:

    i think i will change dreamhost cause it starts to make me sad very often :(((((

  44. Mike Says:

    Is this amature hour? Dreamhost, let me hit you with some knowledge:

    Web Hosting 101
    - don’t release untested updates during peak hours
    - don’t mark an issue as ‘resolved’ when it’s not
    - when all web sites are down, severity = critical
    - during downtime, forward all requests to a controlled error page instead of allowing 500 errors

    Parhaps that’s enough for today’s lesson…

  45. Jim Murphy Says:

    I must have been on the “frisky” cluster since they’ve been blaming me for all of the errors for the last week. I feel somewhat vindicated. Of course my websites are still down like they are every day, but at least they’re not blaming me today…

  46. Jim Murphy Says:

    i think i will change dreamhost cause it starts to make me sad very often :(((((

    Unfortunately, I’m going to have to do the same. It’s too bad, since I basically like everyone I’ve dealt with DH and when the service (rarely) works it’s a great value. When things get all screwed up–which happens too often–its when things seem like less of a “value”

    It’s funny, when DH was first recommended to me the mantra was “great service, great support, great price”. For awhile that was the case. Now, all of the folks still drinking the Dreamhost kool-aid can only say “great price”.

  47. Sabrion Says:

    Hahaha, you´re a fucking liers!!!

    Why don´t you tell us the true? Stop of steal the money from the clients!!!

  48. IZNUDJIVAC Says:

    500 Internal Server Errors are like a good day on DreamHost. Since last year, everytime you do a DB backup 500 Internal Server Errors occurs.

    So it’s something we used to…. at least I am.

  49. Jim Says:

    My Site is down right now with 500 Internal Server Errors. It’s been down since 8pm and still down, what’s up DH? I have been with you for 2 years.

  50. BigBoysToysAZ.com Says:

    Hope this can be resolved soon! just started a large ad campain a few hours ago….

  51. Jonathan Says:

    I’m on ‘ralphie’ and I still have 500 Internal Server Errors! Any update?
    Some pages get the 500 error, while some other do show up, but don’t show everything! This is very annoying!
    When will this be fixed?

  52. Lauren-Noelle Says:

    I’m getting the error whenever I try to do something on my site, keep trying later, it works, then it doesn’t. Support seemed to tell me I couldn’t do stuff via the browser on an alone IP. Well, I’m using Zen Cart and want to use CCs so need my own server, and Zen Cart has me add products (all I’ve been trying to do with the 500s) through the web. The support person had me thinking I need to forget the SSL and just use PP and Google C., when this was a known issue and not caused by me, in actuality. What I’m saying is why didn’t support tell me, it was only this morning I heard back?

    And yes I got nervous that this said resolved, because I’m constantly getting the error.

    I got it at one of my blogs, too, on Monday, but haven’t noticed since. (Haven’t been on my blogs as much.)

    And hey Ben, I’m so sorry. One of my sites isn’t even live, so I’m not losing business yet, but I do have a deadline I set for myself with lots to do. Oh well, I still need to work on finishing products to be ready.

    Usually, I say great service and great support (not great today, but there are always hiccups). I never though great price. Ha ha. Although, good price for the code monster sales, I guess. Oh and “lots o’ space!” LOL. I’m faithful, especially since it was announced it’s a green host.

    And can we stop swearing in this public forum?

  53. Diana Says:

    Our message board is still getting these internal server error messages and when I just went to post a message about it to alert users that it’s being worked on, I got yet another one! I hope this gets resolved soon.

  54. Frederik Says:

    Hi,

    On our server this issue is still open. All sites get this error.

  55. Haberim61.com Says:

    Nice, thanks..Nice, thanks..

  56. Leonardo Says:

    Allway having problem on my website I think many promese of dreamhost and after many suprises. Dont like this situation

  57. mert Says:

    thnks a lot

  58. mert Says:

    sagol haci

  59. ufuk Says:

    :)teşekkürler.dostum

Leave a Reply

Comments posted here may not be viewed by DreamHost staff at all. This is not a way to contact DreamHost.