Resolving the 500 internal error message on the web site

This error usually occurs if there is something wrong with the web.config file. At first please check the general XML definition of the web.config file, since the web.config file is basically only a XML configuration file. There are a lot of XML validators out there where you can copy and paste the code to validate it, for example the one on the w3schools.com page (http://www.w3schools.com/Dom/dom_validate.asp). Also try to remove all custom tags in this file and when in doubt you can check the default web.config file definitions in the Kentico installation folder (<installation directory>\<Kentico version>\Webinstaller\Versions\<web.config version>\web.config).

For a more detailed error message on IIS7 please select the Detailed errors option on the 500 Status Code by clicking Edit Feature Settings in the IIS in the section Error Pages on your web site or virtual directory.

The error messages should be logged in log files on the file system. There could be a more detailed error message, so check the logs also. By default they are located in the folder c:\inetpub\logs\LogFiles\W3SVC1\.

This error message can be also caused by some invalid IIS configuration. If there is a more detailed error message (e.g. 500.19), please try to search for it on the web, since all the 500 error messages troubled someone before you already.
 

-bp-