Site Stopped Working on Hostgator (404 errors)

Question

This isn't a question, but anyway: my site stopped working today on Hostgator. Any link I clicked resulted in a 404 error, though the home page worked.

Even though my .htaccess file had worked before, it suddenly stopped working. Now I had to add

RewriteBase /qa

to get it to work correctly.

 

Strange. Not sure how it's possible that it worked before. The install of QA didn't change, nor did the location of the directory, etc.

Comments

You double posted and should hide this Q.

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Thanks, I hid the other one.

Answer 1

Apache released 2.2.23 on Sept 13, and Hostgator updated too (tech support call just now):

httpd -v 
Server version: Apache/2.2.23 (Unix) 
Server built: Sep 19 2012 10:32:44 

So that's the most likely explanation.

Answer 2

This just happened to me as well and seemed to correspond to several spammy questions that were asked within the system in the past day. Could there be any correlation? I'm trying the fix that @Dan mentions above now.

UPDATE: The fix noted above worked for me as well, but I'd really like to understand root cause of this. Can anyone shed some light on this for me?

Comments

Definitely (probably) no correlation to any question, since even a reset of the full DB will cause the problem to persist. I bracketed it down to the .htaccess file which was "different." My guess would be that it's definitely a change on Hostgator and particularly to the default htaccess rules. This is not my area of expertise though, so I have no real idea...

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Well, big thanks for taking the time to write up your solution. It worked for me on Bluehost as well this week!

Cheers

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Welcome. Apache released 2.2.23 on Sept 13. I'd call that a very interesting coincidence.

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Yeah, just confirmed with Hostgator.  Updating my question.