Let me just start off by apologising for the downtime, which lasted for approximately 16 hours. Many of you will have been met with “500 Internal Server Error” when trying to access the site. This is because, (un)surprisingly, the server encountered an Internal error.

Due to the demands of the scripts I’ve written for other parts of the site, we require certain aspects of PHP to be enabled. The default compilation of PHP on the server did not support some of these scripts. Therefore, we decided that we would recompile PHP to include this functionality. However, recompiling PHP caused the almighty Plesk control panel to become misconfigured, which meant that PHP scripts on the server were not parsed (didn’t work). Consequently, Apache thought “!*$£%(^@?” when this happened and threw up a 500 error.

The compilation of PHP would have worked if it wasn’t for the control panel, which likes to sink itself into all the server processes.

The moral of this story is, you should read into your server configuration closely before trying to compile PHP yourself. I write PHP, not install it.

Anyway, I eventually got everything working again and we are pleased to be back online, resuming normal service (yet again).

What a week.

Thanks,
Geoff
The GoSquared Team