Websites Down Error 500
News and General
I have 6 websites at a usually pretty good webhost. I have 4 ExpressionEngine websites and 2 WordPress websites at the webhost. As of Sunday, all of my ExpressionEngine sites are down with an Error 500. I contacted the webhost support and they suggest I restore from backup system they have. What I want to know is what would cause all 4 ExpressionEngine websites to not be reachable all at once? I have not touched the websites for months due to my wife’s passing. There is nothing I did to cause this. Is there anything you can think of that would cause only the ExpressionEngine websites to go down?
If this is an older ExpressionEngine site and they forced an update to 7.4 or 8.x from an older version, then EE or add-ons could be throwing errors. This is almost always caused by a forced PHP update or something like that. Occasionally it has to do with a change to Apache or Nginx config.
Without more info, it is tough to know what the cause was. Do you have any error logs that might provide more information? If there are no logs, Andy’s answer is the best explanation.
You were right. I got this from the webhosting support people:
It appears the listed sites are not compatible with PHP version 7.4 (which is what assigned on them). So I placed them to PHP 5.6 and they are loading now.
Now I need to find a way to update the sites from 2.x to a newer version. Is it hard?
Hi Jose! It can be challenging, but doesn’t need to be. It’s mainly because of addons/plugins that are used. Some of these are available in EE7 version, some are not. And somefunctionality has over the years been integrated into EE itself. If you want to attempt to update those sites yourself you can always post a list of addons used here in the forums and we’ll do our best to help you out. Otherwise you can always reach out to some of us to do it for you. There’s a lot of knowledge and capability here.
Like Jelle said, it depends. An EE site with no 3rd party add-ons can take 2 minutes. A lot of add-ons that all have modern versions, it can take 5 minues (after you collect all the newest versions). Beyond that it’s impossible to know without seeing all the add-ons.