Error page after moving site

I know this has been posted all over the forums. I have looked at a bunch of threads and still cannot figure this out.

I have an opencart site running on GoDaddy Shared hosting. The main issue is that it's slow and I'm getting the "MySQL server has gone away" error often. I have narrowed that down to just being crappy hosting.

I upgraded to a dedicated virtual server, and setup CentOS with apache, php, mysql, ftp, etc. I can get a test page to come up with no issues.

I created a test opencart site to get the proper config.php and admin/config.php and that site worked great.

I moved my files over from the existing site (except the config.php and admin/config.php) and also imported my database using phpmyadmin.

When loading the page I get the 500 internal server error! the main site and the admin page. Any ideas?

Why does the test site not throw the error, but the existing data does?

I did notice that if I left vqcache in there I could get something to load. As soon as I delete the vqcache i'm back to the error.

any help is greatly appreciated!

http://50.63.141.101 is the site I'm working with.

I changed the permissions on all files to 777, and now the site loads, but it looks all funny like the code is incorrect or something. I'm attempting to zip the files, upload that via ftp and then will extract and see if that works.

Was a permission issue. Basically just followed the errors in the browser source code, and chmod 777 all files that were getting permission denied and eventually the site worked.