For some reason I have been geeting server error 500 messages occassionally for this url – http://terrywassall.org - althoug a connection is made a little later or on refreshing the browser. Strangely I don’t seem to be getting the same problem with http://terrywassall.org/blogs/ or http://terrywassall.org/wiki/. On reporting this to 34SP they reported back to me (very quickly)  “… the few connection issues seen in your error_log with phpfastcgi both relate to when apache on the server was restarted, this can happen when users add/delete things like subdomains/webusers etc . It looks like on this occasion it was the restarts that caused the errors to occur, php fastcgi however allows for idling and can sometimes become detached from the apache process…” with the offer of switching my account to pure phpcgi to see if this helps with the errors I am getting. Needless to say I had no idea of what fastcgi is let alone pure phpcgi. I was assured there would be no side affects to switching to pure phpcgi other than perhaps a ‘tiny’ decrease in performance. So the switch has been made and so far no more server error messages. I usually try to get my head round these technical issues as I do find it useful to have at least some idea of what the techies are saying. I’ve looked at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FastCGI to get some background. A WP fourm post on server errors that has several mentions of fastcgi and problems is at http://wordpress.org/support/topic/259015.