Today I needed to move some sites to a different server.  A wordpress and an old oscommerce. The server was a windows server from godaddy – the hosting was a shared one

After setting up the database and the files I run into this error:

500 Internal Server Error

It’s a general server error that can be debugged only if you have access to the IIS error logs or the errors are displaying directly on the html page (which is not the case with godaddy shared hosting)

After some debugging I’ve noticed that the error was triggered by various reasons that personally I thought it can’t trigger this kind of error, like usage of $HTTP_SERVER_VARS (because register_long_arrays was disabled)

Anyway editing the php5.ini from server root did the trick:

register_globals = on (for the old and dying friend called oscommerce)
register_long_arrays = on (for the same old friend)
short_open_tag = on
log_errors = off (apparently the 500 error appears if the log file can’t be found or it’s not writable)

and other settings that are not directly related with this problem