Internal server error (500), yet pages of store load normally (...)

[Sovjohn]

Hello,

Our Technical Dept. has tried everything, and our last resort is Zen Cart (and the control panel vendor, CPanel) to resolve this.

We have searched all documentation, as well as forums and online resources, and could not trace a problem similar to ours. We have set permissions (755/644/et al) as recommended by Zen Cart documentation for SUPHP installations, as well.

A customer has specified a very weird error on his website, namely he is facing problems with search engine crawlers / bots.

Upon investigation, we found out a very peculiar outcome:

The customer's website ( http://www.futurehouse.gr , based on the last stable version of Zen Cart) loads normally to every human visitor using any browser, such as Firefox, IE, et al.

However, attempting to access this website either as a bot, or even using the 'wget' command, gives out an HTTP 500 Internal Server Error message.

As can be easily understood, crawlers / bots give up after encountering an HTTP 500 error, while for some reason unknown to us, human visitors using conventional browsers can view the website normally, despite the HTTP response, the website loads as normal.

We have found no information at all for this error message in our error logs, but I thought that you might be able to point us to the right direction.

The server runs a relatively hardened PHP installation, under a SUPHP/Suhosin/ et al environment.

The customer, rightly so, complains that his website is totally inaccessible to search engines. Yet it works...with humans, or at least browsers.

Any kind of feedback would be most welcome. We will also contact the control panel vendor about this issue, in case they can point us to a new direction.