This morning I woke up to a downed site. I could log into the administration section of the site, but none of the public-facing pages worked. Looks like this might be specific to ExpressionEngine on Dreamhost, but I’m not completely sure about this.
Since we hadn’t made any changes to the site in a long while I was a little confused about what could be causing the issue. Turns out it ended up being a small change that was needed in the .htaccess file.
Here is a copy of line 3 in the .htaccess code before the change:
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [L]
Turns out that I just needed to add a ‘?’ right after the ‘php’ like this:
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php?/$1 [L]
Once I made this little change everything was back up and running.
Again, this change looks like it was specific to Dreamhost. I checked out a few other sites that use ExpressionEngine on other hosts where I know the .htaccess file hasn’t been changed, and they are still up and running.
If somebody else knows what might have caused the change in functionality please feel free to weigh in.