403 Forbidden on everything...

[Fourtoes]

Last month I had this error on my website...

"Forbidden

You don't have permission to access / on this server.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request."

It somehow resolved itself within several hours.
I hadnt changed anything on the cPanel or updated my website so was a bit confused to what happened.

The yesterday it happened again. Its now been over 24 hours. It was all working fine before that and I haven't changed/updated anything.

I'm not that technically minded so please take that in mind with your answers.
I've contacted my webhost and he's a little baffled also.
Any help greatly appreciated as my website is seen by prospective clients.

Oh if it helps the website is http://www.fourtoes.co.uk

And yes I can still access my cpanel its just my website etc doesnt load.

Thanks in advance.

Tony

[jeffmonte]

Tony,

Just type the command on via shell;

tail -f /usr/local/apache/logs/errorlogs | grep yourdomainname

And paste the results here.

Hope it could be of a permission issue

[nobodyk]

It's probably just apache. It could be that apache is under stress, or is just slightly misconfigured, ie not optimized properly.

[Miraenda]

403 Forbidden errors are typically permissions ones, which normally indicates that either your folder or file has the wrong permissions. You'll want your webhost to open up a ticket with cPanel if they cannot figure it out for you.

[Fourtoes]

My webhost emailed me back and said he'd found it was a problem with the .htaccess file.

He renamed it as .htaccess2 and it seemed to solve the problem, back up and running. I'll ask him to elaborate as I dont want it to happen again, and wonder why it happened in the first place???

thanks for the replies guys.

[arunsv84]

Hi Tony,

Please ask your host for the exact error message in apache error log. You can check logs after logging to your control panel. You can rename the .htaccess2 to .htaccess using cpanel file manager and monitor the logs to see the exact reason.

[big_bull]

Hi,

Renaming .htaccess is not a solution, if your .htaccess is renamed, all your redirects set there or other .htaccess rules set will not work, ask them to rename it to .htaccess and find cause of issue, may be you have added some unsupported rules or paste output here.

[nilesh_kolte]

Firts you should get what error you are getting. You will get that using

tail -f /usr/local/apache/logs/error_log | grep username

Paste the error here so that we will suggest you.

[rkj]

It seems to be the problem with your rewrite rules in your .htaccess. The
error_ logs will help you to find the exact cause.