Tim Derouin on "[Plugin: Feed Them Social - Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Vine, Pinterest, etc] 500 Internal Server Error"

Hi, I happen to work for DreamHost :)

So a few things are at play here, and it makes it a total PITA for everyone. And none of us work for Instagram, who is screwy as all get out :/ I noticed that the plugin was updated 5 days ago (and before that, 3 weeks to fix ... Pinterest it looks like). But none of that seems related.

I do plugin reviews for .org :) I'm pretty good at that kind of check ;)

On the DH side... We haven't made any rate limiting changes, but if we had it would should up as a 418 - I'm a little teapot - error, which would relate to our ModSecurity firewalls. That it's an error 500 means it's a 'pure' PHP error. Which is not super helpful, I know.

What HAS happened lately is we force upgraded people to PHP 5.5 and 5.6. And some people HAVE been moved to new servers. Both of those could be in play here, since the new servers are on Ubuntu and weird stuff has happened.

One thing we've found in error logs that seems relevant is this:

PHP Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in /REDACTED/wp-content/plugins/feed-them-social/includes/feed-them-functions.php on line 1890

30 seconds seems incredibly short. I also see a lot of this:

Premature end of script headers: admin-ajax.php

My best guess, and I've only just started digging into this one, is that we're hitting a random PHP error simply due to being moved and the PHP details changing.

I would immediately check what version of PHP you're on (go to Panel -> Domain -> Edit domain, scroll down to PHP). Make sure you're on at least PHP 5.6 FastCGI but PHP 7 would also be something to check.

Also if you WERE moved, and you happen to have a custom php.ini/phprc file, disable it for now. See if that helps. You may have some old code in there which is unhappy with the new location, or simply missing.