The setup

I have a Laravel application running on my primary domain, mainapp.com . The Laravel public/ folder is symlinked to a subfolder in the document root, and a custom .htaccess routes everything through it. I was in the process of consolidating several separately-deployed instances of the same app into one, using Hostinger's parked domain feature so all domains point to a single codebase.

What went wrong

I parked four domains on top of mainapp.com . Three of them — alpha.com , beta.com , and gamma.com — worked immediately. The fourth, delta.com , was broken in a very specific way: static files like .svg and .html loaded just fine, but any .php file returned a blank HTTP 500 error. Not a Laravel error page — a raw server-level 500, before PHP even started.

I tested with the simplest possible file:

<?php echo "Hello World" ; ?>

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mainapp.com/test.php — works fine.

delta.com/test.php — 500. No output.…