flevour unplugged

Tonight I activated a shared hosting account at Crucial Paradigm. The process was fast and smooth and you get to pay only 1$ for the first month of service.

I must say they have a very brilliant and responsive contact service, which balances the fact they have very poor documentation and knowledge base articles. In fact it took me 2 hours from filling the first sign-up to have a working account with SSH enabled and a problem resolved by their support staff. This is quite valuable if you realize that also enabling SSH requires opening a ticket with tech support.
This article should be put in the series “info I wish I could find in Google rather than asking the tech support”. If only I had series in this blog. But I feel like a blog is, among other things, a way to share your experiences in such a way that they will be useful to others. If you still don’t know what I mean, I’ll tell you the most visited pages here are “
Drupal: changing “files” directory configuration setting”:http://flevour.net/blog/drupal-changing-files-directory-configuration-setting or Mapping arrow keys in Vim. You get my point?

So I’m simply reposting the reply I got from the tech guy at Crucial Paradigm in case someone in the future needs this info.

500 internal server error

Hello Francesco,

Permission of files were incorrect which caused the issue. We corrected it. Now domain is loading fine from our end. Please verify it from your end.

As a security measure, our shared servers are php-suexec.

I will give more description on this matter.

When PHP runs as an Apache Module it executes as the user/group of the webserver which is usually “nobody”. Under this mode, files or directories that you require your php scripts to write to need to have 777 permissions (read/write/execute at user/group/world level). This is not very secure because besides allowing the webserver to write to the file it also allows anyone else to read or write to the file.

With PHP running as CGI with suexec enabled your php scripts now execute under your user/group level. Files or directories that you require your php scripts to write to no longer need to have 777 permissions. Your scripts and directories can have a maximum of 755 permissions (read/write/execute by you, read/execute by everyone else). PHP running as CGI/suexec is much more secure than the older Apache module method.

But there are 4 rules for php to work fine on phpsuexec enabled servers. They are

1. .htaccess should not contain any php config values. Such php values should be specified in php.ini.
2. Permissions for all the php files must be 644
3. Permissions for all web directories must be 755
4. Ownership must be of the user and not nobody or any other user.

Technorati Tags: 500 crucial paradigm internal server error