A little while ago Bluehost updated Rails to 2.0 on all the servers, and I wasn't notified that it was going to happen. When they did that my site stopped working. I've spent a huge amount of time trying to get it working again, but still haven't been able to. I installed all the new gems on my dev PC and made a few tweaks to the website code and was able to get it working fine on there. The main change I did was to add "RAILS_GEM_VERSION = '1.2.6' unless defined? RAILS_GEM_VERSION" in my environment.rb file to force it to use the older version. The problem is that even though it's working in my dev PC, I still can't get it running on bluehost. I've also tried to upgrade the site to Rails 2 but that just led me into a heap of incompatibility issues with various engines and plugins I've used, so at this point it seems my best bet is to get the old version working again.

There's two separate (maybe related) problems I'm having...

The first is to do with fast cgi. If I have the .htaccess file set up to use fast cgi and try to browse my site, the browser displays the contents of dispatch.fcgi instead of executing it. As I understand it all I need to activate fast cgi is to have at the top of my .htacess file...
AddHandler fastcgi-script .fcgi
...then below the other rewrites I put...
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ dispatch.fcgi [QSA,L]

In the past this worked fine, but since I tried to update the site to deal with the rails upgrade and redeployed it, fast cgi hasn't worked. I've hunted all over the web and everything I read points to one of three things to check. First is making sure the contents of .htaccess are correct (as I described above), second is permissions on the dispatch.fcgi file (i.e. making sure it's executable), and the third is making sure the shebang is correct inside dispach.fcgi. I've checked all this stuff over and over and everything seems to be in order, yet it refuses to execute the file correctly.

So eventually I gave up on fast cgi and fell back to normal cgi, which is where my second problem comes in. When I have the .htaccess configured for that I just get a HTTP 500 everytime I try to browse to the site. I have the environment set to 'test' and so I'd expect something to be written to test.log but there's nothing in there at all. Beyond that log file I'm not sure where else I can look so I'm at a loss how else to work out what's actually causing the error. Is there anyone here who can help with this, even if it's just ideas about how to find what the problem really is?