This one really caught me by surprise. One day my site (
gtsexton.com) is working fine, the next day I'm getting the following error
when I try to open an html page:
Forbidden
You don't have permission to access /index.html on this server.
Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an
ErrorDocument to handle the request.
Apache Server at www.gtsexton.com Port 80
I'm using
GoDaddy.com Economy Linux Hosting
for this domain, with PHP5. When I contact their helpdesk, after
I pushed back really hard on the "clear your cache", "try a different
browser", and "disable plugins" suggestions, someone finally decided that
the solution was to remove my .htaccess file and that they don't support
"custom coding".
Here are the contents of that .htaccess file:
AddHandler x-httpd-php5 .html .htm .cgi .php
Of course, this line is needed in order to use php in your html files,
such as in the following command:
<?php include("./menu.php"); ?>
Since I have multiple GoDaddy
hosted sites, I was able to determine that
Hosting Configuration 2.1 or earlier doesn't have the problem, and that it
only manifests on a site with Hosting Configuration 2.2. Hmmm, those
numbers look like Apache versions. While I never got anyone to admit
it, it appears as though GoDaddy updated their Apache web server to version
2.2, which needs new commands in the .htaccess file in order to map PHP
parsing to html files. They were nice enough to point out that the
"Options +ExecCGI" line is now required in .htaccess file in order to map
php parsing to html files. In summary, your .htaccess file should look
like this:
AddHandler x-httpd-php5 .html .htm .cgi .php
"Options +ExecCGI"
