Hi David,

Just to clarify, the reason for this so that you get nice urls on your website, so parts.html not something like /catalog/category/id/22

The 500 error, that’s the webserver saying “urh something went wrong, but I’m not sure quite what went wrong and I’m not telling you either”.

So this could be a collection of things, the most obvious one is that in the .htaccess file in the root directory for your Magento installation, make sure that “RewriteEngine on” doesn’t have a # symbol in front of it.

And also the same for “RewriteRule .* index.php [L]” too.

And also this is most likely to be it, in your .htaccess file, remove the # from these lines:

I contacted my hosting provider 1and1 (i had opened an account before i came across your recommendation for simple servers) and they fixed the problem by turning off “Use Web Server Rewrites”.

If the above doesn’t solve it (which it should do). What I would do is turn it on and then call a page, then check the error logs and see what messages are being left behind as they’ll give you the reasons for the 500 error message.

I also had a quite search around and found these links that may help:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6956997/magento-500-internal-server-error
http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewthread/199907
http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewthread/18974/
https://drupal.org/node/232773 ( Drupal but suggests setting “RewriteBase /” explcitly )

And a general summary of these, points to it being handlers mentioned at the beginning.

Let me know how you get on.

Matt