Site crash issue

I am setting up a new WordPress site on Rackspace Cloud Sites, and when I install and then try to activate the free version of s2Member, the entire site crashes and the following message is displayed:

Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, root@localhost and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
Apache/2.2 Server at http://www.mysite.com Port 80

I cannot get into the admin dashboard or anything else on the site. This has now happened twice on two different domains at Rackspace. What should I do? Thanks!

Thank you for reporting this important issue.

I’m unaware of any reason s2Member would cause this issue. Does deleting the s2Member files via FTP fix the issue? Does this issue happen when you install s2Member, or when you activate it?

I would recommend contacting Rackspace and have them look into why this would happen as well.

Here’s what Rackspace support wrote to me:

There seems to be an issue with your .htaccess file.
If you comment out the following lines the site comes up:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (^|\?|&)s2member_file_download\=.+ [OR]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (^|\?|&)no-gzip\=1
RewriteRule .* – [E=no-gzip:1]

Is it safe to delete those lines, or will this impact how s2Member works on my site?

Thanks!

Is it safe to delete those lines, or will this impact how s2Member works on my site?

These lines disable GZIP on your server for s2Member’s file downloads. You can comment them out for now, but it may be necessary to add them back in if you ever have problems with s2Member’s file downloads.

Okay, thanks for the help!

Okay, thanks for the help!

No problem. Let us know if you need any further help. :-)