EMERGENCY – Error 500

Try disabling the iThemes Security plugin through the wp_options table, row active_plugins.

Thanks, but it doesn’t seem to work.

Actually I have already been through all this list:
https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-fix-the-internal-server-error-in-wordpress/
without any success… I am contacting my host.

I thought some knowledgeable people about the iThemes security plugin could maybe help though: I was wondering if the following lines that seem to block people from editing the htaccess didn’t crash everything (to protect the site?).

<files .htaccess>
			Order allow,deny
			Deny from all
		</files>

And if that’s the case if there is no way to “unlock”/”uncrash” the site?

Maybe I should have re-allowed before editing… I do agree :/
My VERY BIG bad in this case!

And I did try to deactivate all plugins via FTP and via phpmyadmin, without success.

Hi, 500 error is usually caused by htaccess issues. Make sure to delete everything from htaccess that’s not default wordpress rules:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

See if that helps, and let me know.

Unfortunately I already tried that without success.

I just tried it again while also disabling the plugins through FTP, doesn’t work either.

Hi,

It would seem that I have found the solution to this issue (hurray!):

As the error log of my host yesterday came to be available only today, I went to check it and the server indicated the following error:

Invalid command '\xef\xbb\xbf#', perhaps misspelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration

It turns out that this is due to a misreading of the text document I used to write the .htaccess file due to wrong encoding, as explained here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5373334/500-internal-server-error-when-using-htaccess-with-rewriteengine

I made sure I saved my .htaccess using ANSI encoding and everything went back to normal.

Hope it helps if you encounter the same problem.