News module admin page performance issue -- nevermind: [SOLVED]

[byset]

Hi, I'm having a problem with the news module in a CMSMS site, latest verson (1.4.1). Can log in to the admin section fine, but when I click on "News" in the "Content" menu, it just hangs for 15 seconds or so and then gives me a 500 internal server error almost every time. Maybe one out of every 15 times that I attempt to load the page it successfully loads after long delay, but normally I get the error.

There are about 460 news items in the news module so far. It seems like the more articles that get entered the worse the problem gets. So I guess the issue is that processing the large number of news items is causing the script to time out or something? It's on a shared host with ~160 other sites. And it's sluggish in other places as well.

The error message isn't detailed, just a blank page that says "500 Error - internal server error."

So I guess my questions are: 1. Does my assessment of the problem sound right? 2. Is there any way short of moving to a new host or deleting news stories to alleviate this problem? Is there anything I can ask the web hosting company to do that might help?

Thanks in advance.

UPDATE: The problem seems to have been solved.
The site is hosted by 1and1 and the php version running was 4 dot something. I followed these instructions to run php5 instead and the problem is solved:

put these lines in .htaccess file:
AddType x-mapp-php5 .php
AddHandler x-mapp-php5 .php