Internal Server Error in WordPress Blog with WP Super Cache

My site was down for almost 7hrs with 500 Internal Server Error messages.

Immediately I raised a ticket at my hosting service support to look into the issue and fix it. But the developers said they couldn’t support this issue, said my site was consuming more CPU usage and requested me to upgrade the hosting package to avoid this problem.

I started exploring – how come all of a sudden site shows 500 Internal Server Error; I immediately started accessing some of the static files hosted – they were working fine – so I thought there might be some issue with my WordPress blog.

Here are the steps I have followed to find the main issue:

1. I checked the .htaccess file, whether it exists or not – and checked their entries too; all seems to be OK.
2. I checked the wp-config.php file for any misconfiguration; this also seems to be fine.
3. As the support team said my site is consuming more CPU usage, my first guess was to check which Search Engine Bots are hitting my site mostly, so I started exploring the bots. I went to Google WebMaster Tool and slowed down the crawl rate, but no response – my site was not up even after 1hr, then tried the robots.txt method to disable Search Engine Bot with respective IPs which are hitting my site. Even after doing all these, I could not find the problem and was unable to make my site work.
4. I became blank – everything was fine, but the blog is not accessible. So I started to google about 500 Internal Server Error with WordPress.
5. Immediately I came across the following articles from QuickOnlineTips.com, which are really worth checking.

Site Down 36 Hours, How I fixed Internal Server Errors

and

Fix WP Super Cache Errors

When I read both articles, I found that this 500 Internal Server Error is something to do with the WP Super Cache WordPress plugin. So just thought to disable it immediately, but I couldn’t access my WordPress Admin Interface :(.

Just started exploring the WP Super Cache plugin config files to disable the plugin via FTP.

This is how I managed to disabled the plugin without running out of any errors:
Go to the “wp-content” folder, where you will find a file named wp-cache-config.php
Open the page with your favorite editor – find $cache_enabled and $super_cache_enabled and change their value from TRUE to FALSE to disable the plugin.

Immediately after that, my site was up with no errors – yuppy thank god somehow I managed to make my site up and running successfully.

And then logged in to my WordPress admin interface to enable the plugin back to check whether I face the problem again, somehow there are no errors after enabling WP Super Cache plugin back.

So thought to share this experience with you all for not to waste his/her time to solve this simple problem :)

So guys keep this in mind whenever your WordPress blog is down with 500 Internal Server Error.

I hope this helps a couple of blog owners out there :) – Good Luck!