I'm using shared hosting with minimal access to any configuration settings.
I've created a more or less empty HTML file, emptypage.html
, with the following contents:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<body>
</body>
</html>
When I pass an encoded URL as a query string parameter, I get a 403 error from the server.
Example URL:
http://example.com/emptypage.html?u=http%3A%2F%2Fexample%2Eorg
However, if the encoded URL is for the same domain, the page displays normally.
Example URL:
http://example.com/emptypage.html?u=http%3A%2F%2Fexample%2Ecom
Similarly, if the 'h' from the beginning of the URL is removed, the page displays normally.
Example URL:
http://example.com/emptypage.html?u=ttp%3A%2F%2Fexample%2Eorg
Could this be the result of some web server setting that I may be able to override in my local .htaccess
file? My web host uses Apache (not sure which version).
NOTE: I asked a similar question earlier but it was not well understood and was put on hold. I've since done more research to figure out what exact conditions are yielding this issue.