403 Forbidden The website’s configuration prevents you from accessing this page

Hosting Support
1

My website: mildot.epizy.com/

I did a small change to my very simple index2.html and now I get this error. If I run index2.html on my PC it works fine. What could be wrong?

2

Delete the index2.html file, then rename the index2.html file from your PC to index.html, and upload it on the htdocs folder!

3

Hi, just tried. By some reason the start point needs to be named index2.html (the original start file had that name). But still get the 403 error. I have uploaded both a index2.html and index.html. The content of both are the same:

``
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"> 
<html lang="en"> 
<head> 
	<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> 
	<title>Mildot TargetCam</title> 
</head> 
<body>
    <h1 style="text-align:center;">Mildot TargetCam</h1>
	<h2>
		<p style="text-align:center;">
			<a href="Cam1.htm">Camera 1</a><br>
			<a href="Cam2.htm">Camera 2</a><br>
			<a href="Cam3.htm">Camera 3</a><br>
		</p>
	</h2>
</body> 
</html>
4

how about htaccess file? have you altered it?

5

I don’t think som should I do that?

6

The strange thing is that it worked fine, then I added the link to cam3.html and the H2 and now it fails

7

can I somewhere control which file to load on start? Could it be that setting that was wrong?

8

The original start page is still there, this URL works fine: http://mildot.epizy.com/index2_orig.html, this URL is OK: http://mildot.epizy.com/Cam1.htm

But if I try http://mildot.epizy.com/index2.html I get 404 File not found. So could it be something with permissions?

9

I checked your account, and it’s not a permissions issue. It’s a capitalization issue.

When you visit http://mildot.epizy.com/index2.html, you’ll see a 404 error page. But when you visit http://mildot.epizy.com/Index2.html, you’ll see the actual content.

This is caused by the fact that our servers, like almost all hosting servers, runs on a Linux operating system. And Linux operating systems have case sensitive files systems. So Index.html and index.html can be two different files in the same folder. And if the server will look for index.html, then it will not load Index.html.

The fix is simple: make sure your file names and URLs use consistent capitalization. I usually recommend to only use lowercase letters in file names.

1 Like
10

Changing filename to lowercase did the trick thanks a lot.

A suggestion is to improve the error message or simple automatically make all filenames lowercase on upload. Since Win10 by default starts filenames with uppercase, there must be other people that got stuck here.

1 Like
11

Thank you for your suggestions!

Which error message are you referring to? The 404 Not Found error?

We could add a suggestion to the 404 error page to check for capitalization as well. But that would just be one of many recommendations, because the server has no way to do targeted messages. To the server “Index.html” is just as identical to “index.html” as “potato.html” or “tomato.php”.

Automatically converting file names is probably a bad idea, because it would break the websites of people who have links to file names with uppercase letters.

Both of those problems can be fixed if the server will just

I don’t use Windows for programming myself, but I find that hard to believe. How does Windows have any sort of defaults for file names? Isn’t the file name just whatever you enter as the file name?

Of course, if you have software which automatically applies capitalization (like phone keyboards do), you should be aware of that when programming and possibly disable it.

1 Like
12

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