I was getting into different issues after deploying my Cake PHP website to my shared linux hosting account at GoDaddy.

Basically, this is the setup I have (as per the cake standard of pointing the root of the website to app/webroot):

mysampledomain.com points to ~/html/siteroot/mysampledomain.com/app/webroot.

When I load up http://www.mysampledomain.com, I'm getting thrown at with a 500-Internal Server error.

After 30-minutes of debugging around different .htaccess files of cake, I finally figured out two solutions. One is to point the domain to /html/siteroot/mysampledomain.com instead of app/webroot. This one, also documented at Cake's bakery website seemed too darn slow to me to afford as a solution.

Here's what I ended up with. Amazingly it turned out to be an easier fix.

For the fix to work, modify your app/webroot/.htaccess file to read the following:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php?url=$1 [QSA,L]
</IfModule>

The only change I have made is the extra slash (/) prefix added to index.php. No double, triple rewrites and not even a bit slower than you would expect. 

Happy baking!