Hi, I am helping out a local business, doing updates on their site. I did not originally create the site and I do not know the person that did. About 5 months ago the website started to go down. Coming up is "500 Internal Server Error". I have figured out that deleting all the .htaccess files on the server fixes this problem, but them a couple days later they come back again. Whatever it is, is creating a .htaccess file in every folder on the site (there are about 30 of them!). How do I permanently fix this issue? Thanks in advance, I'm new to all this, and I have no one to turn to.....
You'd have to supply more information as you don't say what scripts you have on the site, what's in the .htaccess and so forth, but even then it would be easier to look at the site files. In loo of having access to the site, I'd approach solving this by waiting for a .htaccess to be created that causes the issue, then search the sites files for lines from the .htaccess, at that point you should know where it's being created and you can follow the code back to see why and what triggers the creation of the .htaccess files. It might be you can modify the code to just remove the line(s) that cause the 500 error or remove the trigger that creates the .htaccess file.