Well, I screwed up my site big-time. I was trying to make work, but I have close to 10,000 entries for it to analyze (that’s posts + comments) and so it needs altered max_execution_time and memory_limit variables. While I was playing around with different ways to resolve this, I managed to delete my custom php.cgi file. Oops. Most of my website is built on PHP – photo galleries, weblog, personal FTP, everything.
So I tried , but it broke. I filed a support request, choosing the OMG EXTREME CRITICAL EMERGENCY!! EVERYTHING’S BROKEN! People are DYING! option for the first time ever. I realized that the error I had gotten when it died was that the process was killed, and DreamHost occasionally kills processes for no apparent reason, so I figured I’d try again. This time it broke in a different way at the same point, but apparently it was enough for my journal.amanita.net domain to start working again. I’m glad I moved it from /amanita.net/journal to /journal.amanita.net because I think that’s what helped fix it.
Unfortunately my personal FTP and photo galleries are still down; I assume anything that’s actually on amanita.net itself is dead. I am assuming my journal has fallen back on the default PHP installation used by DreamHost; at this point I am more than happy to have it all go back to the default!
Oh. I just removed from my amanita.net .htaccess file the part that told it to look for my custom install. Now everything is using the default DreamHost installation of PHP, and my personal FTP and photo gallery seem to be fine. I’m going to leave my support request in place because I would like to know what happened when I tried to install my custom PHP (the part that broke), but it’s not nearly as critical now. There’s no way to change the priority on the ticket, but if any DreamHost people are reading this, well…get back to me when you can, okay?