Some may have noticed that my website was down with a big fat 500 error for quite some time. This error was due to some configuration change on my hosting providers side that they were not willing to own up to. I was able to pinpoint the error to an HttpModule, but even with my own custom logging and CustomErrors set to 'Off' in my web.config, there was no way for me to troubleshoot the issue.

When I contacted support, they were only able to say "You have a scripting error on your site, try searching the internet for solutions to your problem".  This is why shared hosting blows, especially for someone like me who knows very well what they are doing. I would be happy to assume that it was my fault if it was, but my custom logging and the server logs show that visitors were getting 500 response codes starting at about 11:00pm on June 26th. I did not change any code, it simply stopped working in my sleep.

I decided it was time for some troubleshooting. I was able to determine the source of the problem by removing the module in the web.config, causing it to show me the Asp.Net Yellow Screen of Death.  The message was a Null Reference Exception, which was happening because the context of the application was not properly configured due to the missing HttpModule. So, I copied the code from the Module, put it in a new helper class, and called that class from the Global.asax. Now, you can see, the site is back up and running.

So, why did the HttpModule suddenly stop working? I'll never know. I know it works on my machine, and it used to work on the host machine, but now it does not.  And it obviously was not a code error, as the same code works when moved out of the Module. I have a different module doing some logging, so it isn't that I can't have HttpModules. It's a mystery that will never be solved. The moral of the story, if you can afford it, don't do shared hosting.