WordPress – You don’t have permission to access /wp-admin/admin.php on this server.

A few days ago a interesting problem cropped up with a WordPress website that I maintain for a 3rd party, the error occurred every time I tried up upload a file to the site using the fantastic WP-DownloadManager plugin and was saying…

Forbidden

You don’t have permission to access /wp-admin/admin.php on this server.

After trying a few possible solutions .htaccess (all of which did nothing) I eventually emailed the fantastic guys at UKWSD (website hosting company I use) who found that the problem was being caused by something called Mod_Security.

They turned off this feature and lone behold all is working fine again

After looking at all the grief that this error has caused others on the web I would strongly suggest that you spend no more than a few minutes mucking around with your .htaccess file before calling your web host and getting them to fix it for you 😉