Support » Fixing WordPress » Redirecting to subdirectory: 403 Forbidden message

  • I’m trying to redirect my root URL, rlhai.com, to the blog URL, rlhai.com/home. Unfortunately the site is hosted on Dreamhost, or as I like to call it, “Nightmarehost”. There is currently a splash page at rlhai.com.

    I tried the Dreamhost redirect: didn’t work.
    I tried the Redirection plug-in: didn’t work.
    I tried editing .htaccess file (as many forum posts suggest). I can only access this file via FTP. Plus there doesn’t seem to be an .htaccess file within the root, only in the subdirectory. If I edit this should it be saved into the main root?

    Now suddenly I can log-in to the Dashboard but I can’t view the site.

    When I go to rlhai.com I see the splash page.
    When I try to go to rlhai.com/home the URL becomes http://www.rlhai.com/home/home/home/home/home/home… (infinity etc., this goes on for miles) and a “Forbidden” message: “You don’t have permission to access /home/home/home/home/home/…” etc. etc.
    “Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.”

    Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

    Thank you!!!

    James

Viewing 10 replies - 1 through 10 (of 10 total)
  • First, remove the redirect. Then please provide some details – such as where you installed WordPress on your domain.

    Thread Starter James Campbell Taylor

    (@james-campbell-taylor)

    Hi Esmi,

    Thanks for responding so quickly.

    I already cancelled all redirects. I removed the plug-ins and cancelled the redirect within Dreamhost.

    I uploaded WordPress to the subdirectory rlhai.com/home.

    In the past I’d always uploaded it to the root directory, but apparently Dreamhost doesn’t let you do this without big problems. I figured I’d redirect just it back later (which I’ve also done successfully in the past), but this is also extra hard in Dreamhost.

    There is a really, really, easy solution to this that takes all of 5 minutes. see Allow WordPress to take over the root domain. 🙂

    Thread Starter James Campbell Taylor

    (@james-campbell-taylor)

    OK, I saw that suggestion before.

    My root directory already has an index.php file… Am I supposed to overwrite that with the newly copied file?

    What’s in that index.php file?

    Thread Starter James Campbell Taylor

    (@james-campbell-taylor)

    I should add that the root directory index.php is the one containing the splashpage.

    Thread Starter James Campbell Taylor

    (@james-campbell-taylor)

    <!– Webpage created by Christopher R. Archer –>
    <!– The webmaster can be contacted at owner at christopherarcher dot com –>
    <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”&gt;
    <html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”&gt;
    <head>
    <title>Richard L. Hoffman & Associates, Inc.</title>
    <meta http-equiv=”Content-type” content=”text/html; charset=iso-8859-1″ />
    <meta name=”MSSmartTagsPreventParsing” content=”true” />
    <meta name=”description” content=”Richard L. Hoffman & Associates, Inc. is the country’s leading relocation manager and consultant, specializing in planning and management of office and labratory moves.” />
    <meta name=”keywords” content=”relocation, management, consulting, planning, management, office, lab, labratory, manager, hoffman, richard, associates” /><p><img src=”splashpage6.jpg” height=”900″ width=”1680″ alt=”Richard L. Hoffman & Associates, Inc.”>
    </p>
    </head>
    </html>

    Looks like an old holding page. Rename it to index-old.php and place the copy of WP’s index.php file in its place.

    Thread Starter James Campbell Taylor

    (@james-campbell-taylor)

    Oh my God! I think it worked!

    rlhai.com

    Check it out? Does it look OK to you?

    THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR YOUR HELP! You just saved me hours and hours of work…plus all weekend!

    It all looks fine to me. 🙂

Viewing 10 replies - 1 through 10 (of 10 total)
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