Amped Tech

After posting a new article on one of my Wordpress blogs I suddenly was unable to access my site. I kept receiving this Error 403 Forbidden for the index.php file.

Not much fun because this blog brings in some Adsense income and I was about to leave on a flight. Always hate it when a site dies and I have no time to fix it.

I had no idea what was going on because I am not that familiar with http 403 errors and stuff. At first I thought there was a problem with my hosting company. I checked another blog on the same host and that was running fine.

But this ‘forbidden’ message made me think of permissions so I decided to get into the cPanel and when I opened File Manager I noticed that the file index.php was showing 000 for file permissions.

So next I opened cPanel on another site with a Wordpress blog on it and checked the same file. It was showing 644.

Easy, I went back to te bad site and changed the permissions of index.php to 644 as well and it was live again.

I have no idea what caused the file permissions to change but anyway I am glad I got rid of the Error 403 Forbidden message and had the site running again.

There is plenty of choice in webhosting companies. Sometimes it’s hard to compare all their plans but today I learned customer support is very important.

I had an issue with my sites tonight. I tried to log into one for a check of some stats and it showed a "500 Internal Server Error". In fact they all did.

I have no idea what that meant but it did not look good …

So I went to the website of my hosting company and found the live chat button. Soon someone responded and after a few minutes my sites were back up again!

Good customer service. This is important because I want people visiting my sites to find what they are looking for!

Thanks Matthew at Hostgator.com !