HTTP Error on Image Upload – This worked for me

There are endless posts and threads about the dreaded HTTP Error on image uploads, it was driving me crazy as I quite often have to upload images that have a greater width than 500px so I desperately needed this fixing.

The sites I run are hosted on my own VPS from Webfusion and I knew the problem was more a server issue than a WordPress issue as I didn’t have the problem on my WAMP development environment.

Like a lot of people have mentioned, I went through all the fixes that appear on this forum, .htaccess mod-security fix, reinstalling WordPress, disabling plugins, CHMOD upload directories, checked I had the latest version of flash installed etc etc etc but nothing worked.

I forget which thread it was on, but some mentioned that it could be a server setting with the MaxRequestLen in the fcgid.conf file, at first I didn’t have a clue how to access and edit this file so after a lot of reading, head scratching, phone calls to Webfusion, I managed to edit the file, re-booted the server and hurray, it now works, no dreaded HTTP Error even with high rez images with a width of 4000 pixels!!

Here’s what I did…
1. Download and install PuTTy from https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/
2. Log in as the administrator, the username will be something like ‘root’ and don’t do what I did and try to log in as a domain user as the PuTTY window will just disappear.
3. Once logged in you will have to use Linux commands to navigate to the folder and to edit the file, I’d done a little bit of this in the past, but not a lot so it did take a little bit of time to get my head around it, but it’s not that difficult & there’s loads of help on the web
4. Navigate to the fcgid.conf, I guess this will be located in different places on different servers, mine was located at:
/etc/apache2/mods-enabled
If you can’t find it, I suggest giving your host a ring as they should be able to point you in the right direction.
5. Open the fcgid.conf file to edit it, in my case the line MaxRequestLen wasn’t there, so I added the string:
FcgidMaxRequestLen 1073741824
6. Save file
7. Close PuTTy session
8. Re-boot your server for the amend to take effect, mine was done via Plesk
9. You should now be able to login to WordPress and upload images with a larger width than 500px

Before you attempt this, you will need to make sure you have access to the root directories via PuTTy as an administrator which I think shared hosting won’t allow, but I stand to be corrected on that, if you don’t, then you need to contact your host.

I really hope this helps, it was driving me crazy as I just seemed to be going round and round in circles and getting nowhere fast!

And sorry for starting yet another new thread about this as I thought it might be better to have its own thread rather than to be put at the end of an existing thread as lots of people seem to be having a similar issue.

Good luck!