What in the name of heck…?

Alright, the past 12 hours really haven’t been nice for me. Unexplained site goings-down are not nice at all. When you first see an error (which in my case happened to be a 500 Internal Server Error), you’d think to yourself, "Oh it’s just a server hiccup, it’ll be back to normal in a bit". Then you come back in a bit to find it still not working.
And again, and again, and again.

Anyway, it was about 3pm in the afternoon yesterday when this started. I did a little poking around and found out that FTP was still working, but no HTTP traffic was getting through. By half 3, I had fired off an e-mail to my hosting support guys asking if there was a problem with the server I’m on. Only problem with my support guys is that they say "Please wait at least 24 hours for a response". Which doesn’t help for urgent stuff. The phone support might have helped a lot sooner, but I’d rather not have to pay huge over-inflated rates to make international calls just to get my $4 a month website back up and running quickly. The call would cost more than what I pay to keep this hosted…

Anyway, by the early evening, I had given up trying to find a solution myself, and went to play some games. (Games > exams atm). Much, much later (about an hour ago, based on when I’m writing this ), I went to see what the story was. Load up FF3 and, bam, 500 error. Load up Windows Live Mail, bam, no support response waiting in my inbox. Now we’re starting to get a little cheesed off…

So pretty much the last hour has been spent Googling around to try and find answers to this problem, or at least to read the tales of other people who have had the same problem as me. Most of the results were from people using the WP-Cache plugin on their blogs which seems to clash with my host. However there was one result in which someone said that there may be a problem with the .htaccess file causing problems. I decided to take a chance as see whether there was anything in my .htaccess causing this 500 error.

Mod_rewrite stuff – Nope, not causing it.
AddHandler commands – Negative.
Huge long list of deny lines – No…. hang on a mo, there’s the culprit.

So, it’s making me think how on earth that huge long list of IP addresses that are banned from accessing my site is causing the problem. I remember that earlier today I had to ban a new IP, and I had added a comment to explain why it was banned. So, to give it a shot, I put the IP’s back and removed the comment. Success!

But why the comment was causing the error was beyond me. It was commented directly after the deny xx.xx.xx.xx, so there shouldn’t have been a problem. I put the first comment back and it worked. I put the second back and it broke. At least now I had managed to find the exact culprit. And then came the most annoying bit out of this entire fiasco. I replaced a backslash I had in the comment with a space…

…and the fucking thing worked again…

For fuck’s sake… all this downtime for the sake of a god-damn backslash…

Oh BTW, I still haven’t received a response from the support team…