WordPress Blank Screen Of Death After Dreamhost Upgrade

Dreamhost is currently upgrading their servers and moving their customers to new servers gradually. Last week was my turn to move.

One of the problems my blogs encountered after the move was the blank screen of death. That is, when you visit this blog, my photo blog and my wife’s blog, all you see is a blank screen. Blank white screen with no error codes and if you view the source code, nothing is there. Visiting the login page or any page will also result in a blank screen of death. I tried rebooting my servers but it did not solve my problem.

I opened a support ticket and their technical support fixed it. Guess what caused it? It’s the Super Cache plugin! The tech support simply changes one line of code on each WordPress installation and everything went back to normal.

If you are experiencing the same problem now because Dreamhost just moved your blog to a new server, here’s the solution:

1. Connect thru FTP and edit advanced-cache.php. That is inside the wp-content folder.

2. Remove whatever word is written between home and your username in the single line of code listed there.
Example:

require_once( '/home/xxxxxx/username/yourURL.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-super-cache/' . 'wp-cache-phase1.php');

should be changed to:

require_once( '/home/username/yourURL.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-super-cache/' . 'wp-cache-phase1.php');

Yes, just removed those xxxxx or whatever is the word in it.

3. After you made the changes, the blank screen of death will be gone! Your blog will be resurrected in no time!

So far, everything seems fine. Please report any blank screen of death that you might encounter on this blog. Thanks a bunch! That’s all for now.