GoDaddy + 500 Internal Server Error

A GoDaddy hosted website of mine had the annoying habit until recently of displaying a HTTP 500 Internal Server Error page whenever an invalid, nonexistent URL was specified, rather than the expected HTTP 404 Not Found error. Annoying because I had a custom 404 error page defined and setup for the site, but for whatever reason GoDaddy was ignoring and showing a 500 error instead.

I let the problem slide for a while, but revisited it tonight, for whatever reason. The culprit, it turns out, was an old WordPress installation, which ultimately led me to the .htaccess file living in the root directory. Being not that familiar with Apache, I pretty much ignored the file in the past. Curiosity got to me, however, and sure enough I found WordPress was the only application referenced in it. I went ahead and removed the .htaccess file, and now I no longer get the 500 error but rather my custom 404 page.

Problem solved.