bad directives in HTACCESS causing failures

any way to avoid site downtime from internal errors?

[amznVibe]

One of the sites I manage is unfortunately is hosted on a server I have little control over. The techs are blithering idiots and are contantly rebuilding apache like every other week and forgetting the modules we had them add to give us more features (like mod_gzip).

Unfortunately after they rebuild, any directives we had in HTACCESS to control the modules, immediately leave the site with an internal server error (500) until I can get them to reinstall the proper modules.

Is there any way I can get the server to either rename htacess so it bad directives go away temporarily (using a cgi off the 500 error I guess) or maybe some HTACCESS command that makes apache more forgiving of bad directives?

(the latter method is obviously previous but I doubt its possible?)

[nancyb]

this is probably a really dumb question, and I really don't mean to be a smart a$$, but ... why don't you get a new host?

I wouldn't think you could ever trust that your site was working if the techs are that careless. :(

[amznVibe]

its a legacy client who is locked into prepaid hosting for a few years... no control over the issue... for new clients we have our own server, I always try to cut out the "middle-man" when I can...