Wordpress on a Hostway Account
Recently I had cause to setup a new Wordpress blog on a system that was hosted by Hostway. We ran into problems getting the permalinks to function. The .htaccess file that Wordpress generates for permalinks was causing Apache on the Hostway system to through a 500 error or give a 400 error. To find out what was going on I looked at the Apache error log and saw a line like:
Permission denied: cannot read directory for multi
After a bit of googling I came up with the following .htaccess that fixed Wordpress Permalinks:
Options +FollowSymLinks -Indexes -MultiViews
#BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule># END WordPress
Notice how in the options line I turn off MultiViews and Indexes? Once I dropped this .htaccess in place Wordpress and Apache were able to play nice. My guess is that Hostway has Multiviews and Indexes on by default such that you can be lazy about the files that you place on their server. It isn’t a terrible way to go just that I wish they had a document showing what options they have enabled. As a side note I can see what mods they have enabled on the server by looking at /etc/apache2/mods_enabled .
I hope that this helps someone else out.
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