I was having a few issues with my hosting from 1&1 last week where a new wordpress install would work fine, but when I imported a site directory and a db to work on it, it produced an “Error 500 – internal server error” message. This was frustrating and 1&1, although quite quick to respond (!), simply rolled out the ‘check your scripts’ advice. Not that helpful when the files and db worked fine on other hosting platforms so I thought I would post the remedy here in the hope it helps anyone else with the same problem.
It’s a very simple fix: In the end, I found a post (i’ve lost the link) that advised placing a ‘php.ini’ file in the root of the site directory and filling it with the line ‘memory=20MB’.
As soon as I ftp’d the file into the site, everything worked fine!