Forbidden means access is prohibited.
This can be a very alarming message when a customer sees their page displaying «Access Forbidden».
The full translation of the message would be:
Forbidden: You do not have permission to access this server.
Additionally, a 403 error was encountered while trying to use the error documents.
Why does this happen?
This message actually shows that your service is working — and possibly working without any errors. But for some reason you do not have permission to access the information you requested.
There are two main reasons that can cause this error.
- Your file or directory permissions are incorrect. Remember that files should have permissions (644) and directories should have permissions (755).
- The application firewall is blocking access. To determine whether this is the cause, you can disable the application firewall (mod_security) from your control panel.
The most typical case is a directory that contains no "index.xxx" file — this situation directly generates a 403 error to protect the directory contents. As soon as the user uploads an index.html file to the directory, the error disappears immediately.