‘Techno Life @ tothepc.com’ has been down for few hours as a result of error “Internal Server Error”. My other website on same server was working fine, so issue had to be with something else.

While contacting dreamhost support, it pointed - issue could be with dns of the website. So, went to goaddy support where tothepc domain is registered. Usual email support tickets were started with no reply as I write this post.

Chatted with few friends and finally Rajesh pointed that this could be issue with .htaccess file. On checking .htaccess file for the website, surprise surprise - it had just one line that contained URL of an adult website.

Someone corrupted .htaccess file as a result was getting ‘Internal Server Error’. Strange part this happened to 3 domains hosted on different hosting accounts and servers.

Not sure how to prevent this from happening in future, here is how I fixed this - opened .htaccess file in edit mode using webftp and modified it with following code:

# BEGIN WordPress
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
# END WordPress

After editing, did some modification in index.php which was also corrupted with some strange characters. Quick save and website started working.

Apologies for the downtime. Such issue was first for me but Rajesh handled such issue before and was there for timely help!