Solved: Hostway, Mod_rewrite and 403 errors

A few months ago, I started experiencing a very big problem with mod_rewrite rules on a site I run that is hosted with Hostway.

A simple mod_rewrite rule like the following would fail with a 403 Access forbidden error:

RewriteRule ^foo$ /static/foo.html [L]

It appeared that the server was getting confused by the fact that there was no directory named “foo”. What confused me most of all, though, was that I hadn’t made any changes to the site that might have prompted this error to start popping up.

Most disturbing, was that Hostway seemed to be at a complete loss as to why this error was suddenly coming up.

In a moment of desperation, while waiting for a response from my host, I came across an ugly hack that worked. If I created a folder named “foo” and in that folder put an .htaccess file with the redirection rule, THEN the redirection actually worked.

For the time being this worked out, so I was able to stop stressing about the fact that Hostway seemed to not understand my problem.

I have had to revisit the problem, however, because this hack really won’t work in the long-term. This time around, Google has presented me with a discussion at WordPress that provides the solution.

Putting the following at the top of the .htaccess file works for me:

Options +ExecCGI +FollowSymLinks -Indexes -MultiViews

Prior to this my .htaccess file only had the FollowSymLinks option set. It is still a mystery to me why the previous file stopped working. Sadly, this is not the first time Hostway has made a configuration change somewhere without any warning that caused sitewide problems.

Sunday March 9, 2008