hosting

When you get a white screen of death or a Server Error 500, the first thing you want to do is check your web server’s error log to see what exactly went wrong.

If you’re on shared hosting however, you might not have access to it.

When deploying a Drupal site on a shared hosting environment running apache/php, chances are php’s safe mode is turned on.

If you’re trying to get flashvideo up and running, you’ll probably run into a problem when Drupal’s cron job tries to run ffmpeg to convert your uploaded video:

“Cannot execute using backquotes in Safe Mode”

Solution: turn off safe mode by modifying your httpd.conf file:
1. find your vhost entry
2. add to that vhost entry: php_admin_flag safe_mode Off

Problem solved.