WHM cPanel 500 internal server error – whostmgr

You may have come across one of the following errors:

• 500 Internal Server Error while accessing cPanel and WHM
• No response from subprocess (whostmgr (cpanel)): subprocess was killed with signal 7

This is usually due to one of the cPanel process failing to load or still running in the background.

First login to your VPS or dedicated server via SSH using some client tool like Putty.

Then type the following: tail -f /usr/local/cpanel/logs/error_log

That error log should show what type of issue you are facing. Most of the time the fix below would work.

Stop cPanel services so you can update the binaries by typing the following shell command:
service cpanel stop

Update cPanel/WHM using:

/scripts/upcp –force

This only updates control panel software. So it shouldn’t break any Apache or MySQL. It will run for a good 5 minutes depending on how long since you last updated this server.

Then start the services back up by issuing this line:

service cpanel start

Hopefully now your WHM and cPanel access should be restored. If it still doesn’t work, search for first line of the error from the start of this process in to Google and you should find some answers from cPanel forum.

If you have a license directly from cPanel you should be able to contact them for support.