If you get a 403 Forbidden Error when you visit your website, there are a few possible causes.  The two most common causes of this error message are:

  • Incorrect File Permissions
  • "No Indexing" in .htaccess file is improperly used

How do I correct a 403 Forbidden Error?

  1. Check the permissions of your files.  If a file or folder is "world" writable, for security reasons the 403 error will display to help protect your site from attacks.  The correct file permissions for files is 644 for php and html pages, 755 or 750 for folders, and 755 for CGI and Perl scripts.  Make sure no files are have permissions of "777."
  2. If the permissions are correct, check your .htaccess file in your site's document root folder.  If you're working with your main domain, this should be the public_html folder. If you are working with an Addon domain, the folder will be inside public_html and will usually be named something similar to yourdomain.com. If you see Options All -Indexes as one of the lines in the .htaccess file, remove -Indexes and save the file.

If the permissions appear to be correct and the Option All -Indexes is not used in your .htaccess file, please contact technical support so that we can look into the issue further for you. Also, here is a link to our guide on troubleshooting a 500 internal server error.

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