Just to try to save others some misery after the latest cpanel update (if you have auto updates on), there is a bug where the loading of the extension for WHM called homeloader.so will fault and cause Apache to see that the PHP process has gone away and it will generate a 500 error.
The workaround is:
- Change your system php.ini file (eg. /usr/lib/php.ini) to insert a semicolon (comment out) at the beginning of the line that looks something like "extension=homeloader.so" or similar.
- If you use a local php.ini file for your store (eg. /home/user/php.ini) then make sure that line is commented out too.