Forbidden: You don’t have permission to access this resource. …

  • Hi

    Yesterday, I was working on the above site preparing for a possible transfer and probably got rid of a plugin or 2, experimented with 2, 3 migration plugins and adjusted some PHP.ini values via the Cpanel. Nothing particular. Of late Jetpack has reported some occasional offline times, probably due to resource use, but that is not common.

    So I was surprised this morning to find the following message when I try to access it:

    Forbidden
    You don’t have permission to access this resource.Server unable to read htaccess file, denying access to be safe
    Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

    I tried the following:

    • tried replacing the htaccess file with a fresh one from WordPress
    • renamed the plugins folder, in case any of them was behind this
    • overwrote all WordPress files with fresh ones
    • used a backup from August
      I all the same keep getting the same error message.
      The site root folder has permissions of 750.
      Could this be related to server-side throttling? Otherwise it does not seem to make sense why I get those errors with any of the above measures.

      What am I missing out or what can I do to get the site back? I have written the web host, in case the site is throttled, and a response may take hours, but in case the problem is this end, what should I do?

      Thank you in advance

    • This topic was modified 5 years, 3 months ago by xprt007.

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  • Moderator bcworkz

    (@bcworkz)

    What is the permissions for the .htaccess file itself? Try setting it to 664 to start with. You can experiment with tighter restrictions if that works. You could rename the file so there is not .htaccess at all. Pretty permalinks will no longer work, but the site should more or less work without errors. When you restore .htaccess, you’ll need to go to permalinks settings to get pretty permalinks back.

    As you’ve seen, responses in these forums can also be hours if not days in coming. Everyone here is a volunteer, so patience is required.

    Thread Starter xprt007

    (@xprt007)

    Hi there

    Thank you very much for the response and the solution suggestions.

    The problem mysteriously disappeared yesterday.
    Actually I had crosschecked permissions and the root folder had 750 and .htaccess I think had 644, but in any case, they were all similar to those of another site sharing the same account but working, and what could have changed them as this seemed to come out of the blue?

    I wrote the host, describing the problem in detail. They told me to try setting up the site in a different subdomain, to try and reduce the number of possible issues and see if it works and was supposed to report back to them before they saw what to do.

    As I was trying to do that, I received an alert from Jetpack that the site was back online after 21 hours!

    I was not able to establish why as I had done nothing after the above steps the day before. The host, after telling them said they had done nothing on their side but after looking at the logs mentioned they had seen some error related to BPS security plugin and something else.

    This however was not convincing as at one time, I used a fresh and virgin, basic .htaccess from WordPress and also disabled ALL plugins. With that, how could they still have influence on the site, with their .htaccess entries on no plugin working, with folder re-named?
    The backup from August also, was online for I guess at least 12 hours, but with site inaccessible until it suddenly came back online.

    So right now, I have no single idea why it was 21 hours offline, but it is working like it did before the problem appeared and the last 7 or so years.

    Regards

    Moderator bcworkz

    (@bcworkz)

    At least its working ??

    I believe some security plugins install additional code files that remain if you disable plugins by renaming folders. If that’s the case the plugin has to be deactivated from the plugins admin screen and possibly even be removed to get rid of the added code files. I don’t know if that’s the case for your plugin, but it’s a plausible explanation.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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