Thanks for responding, and I apologize for posting twice. I thought I had posted in the wrong spot the first time.
With paypal for woocommerce deactivated paypal standard works fine. As far as I can tell I have no caching plugins.
I’ve deactivated all plugins except for woocommerce, gone into incognito mode, reinstalled paypal for woocommerce and tried another purchase and got the same error.
It does say HTTP ERROR 500, so after googling it I’m guessing the best thing to do is put in a support ticket with my webhost. I’ll give it a go anyway. Once again, i appreciate your time.