I’ve been suffering from major blog issues the last few weeks, so much so that my intended participation in the J-Cinema Blogathon had to be called off.
Anyway, if you use 1&1 as a host and have had issues with your Dashboard or uploading images resulting in the following error:
Error 500 – Internal server error
An internal server error has occurred!
Please try again later!
…then the following may be useful to you.
In your root folder you should have an .htaccess file. If not, create one – no extension necessary, just name it ‘.htaccess’.
Put the following entries:
Options All -Indexes
AddType x-mapp-php5 .php
AddHandler x-mapp-php5 .php
# BEGIN WordPress
# END WordPress
…and Bob’s your Uncle, Fanny’s your Aunt. Problem solved. Well it was for me anyway. If you come across the error and would like to leave a comment, please do so, I would like to compile some sort of report to forward onto 1&1.
LoLyfe / admin 
I have been having the same problem trying to post photos to my site. However, when I add the entries above to my .htaccess file instead of getting an “error 500″ I get:
Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 32505856) (tried to allocate 6336 bytes) in /homepages/27/d*********/htdocs/wp-admin/includes/image.php on line 147
Been looking for help all over the place, but nothing is working for me.
@Josh
That sounds as though it’s pointing you to a specific problem now. Have you tried using the WP Photo Ads plugin? Or maybe someone in WP forums can help out.
I won’t suggest referring you to 1&1 as they will say it’s a WP issue anyway.
I’ve had this issue in the past, and raising the PHP_Memory limits in a php.ini file has always fixed it. Until it happened this time.
Your fix worked for me! Thanks!
@deKay
Glad it worked, I’ve added you to my list for 1&1 …
if i enter the lines to my .htaccess, the 550 error disappears but i get the same as josh.
do you know what to do?
@johannes
I’ve been waiting for Josh to come back to me about his issue. As I suggested to him, the error is pointing to a more specific problem. Have you contacted 1&1 and queried this? I’d be interested in what they say as to the cause…
Again, there are a couple of decent plugins that double up as a workaround – as I suggested before, try the WP Photo Ads plugin and see if the error still occurs and come back to me…