Drupal running on lycos webhosting - 500 internal server error

Another quick one this, we recently had a small client experience issues with their Drupal site which was hosted on lycos webhosting. They hadn't changed anything on the site, but suddenly they were getting nothing but 500 (internal server) errors. The solution turned out to be the .htaccess file, and specifically the following 2 lines

Options -Indexes
Options +FollowSymLinks

Commenting them out solved the problem and the site was back up and running.