=\ I've been talking to HostGator support for 30 minutes and all I've managed to get from them is "500 errors are caused by too many processes running at once." Wow, thanks HG for that little gem right there. Sigh.
Anyway, while I'm sure Linode is very good, your response isn't helpful since I'm sure the grandparent, like me, uses HostGator because they're inexpensive and give you a decent amount of rope. Linode is just too expensive if you just need a basic shared host with ssh access and "unlimited" space.