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403 forbidden error from godaddy servers
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I've had a similar problem with GoDaddy (not that I can cite all the technical stuff. ) The designer of the plugin I was using tried to sort out the problem, but we didn't get anywhere. Goodreads seems to think the problem is with GoDaddy, while GoDaddy says it's with Goodreads. I think that if you stay on GoDaddy, you may be out of luck.
The Bookwyrm's Hoard wrote: "I've had a similar problem with GoDaddy (not that I can cite all the technical stuff. ) The designer of the plugin I was using tried to sort out the problem, but we didn't get anywhere. Goodreads s..."How did you resolve the issue? did you take up another hosting somewhere elese?
How did you resolve the issue? did you take up another hosting somewhere elese?
Well thats exactly what the problem is. I tried a lot of other tests and nothing seemed to work. Then at last I changed my hosting provider to "Hostgator" and everything starts working.So if you have hosting by godaddy, you cant user goodreads api, simple as that. May be goodreads should consider white listing the IPs from godaddy [may be on demand basis or something].
Thanks,
Prakhar
Ayush wrote: "How did you resolve the issue? did you take up another hosting somewhere elese?"No, at this point I just live with it. I may switch my hosting at some point, but I'm not tech-savvy and I don't really know how to port my blog over, so I'll have to hire someone to do it for me.
Mod
It's a long shot, but if it does end up working that will tell us something.
If it doesn't work, our sysadmin speculated that the problem could be GoDaddy's SSL validation, which requires GoDaddy to change their SSL configuration.
If you could dump the certificate info in PHP and email that to me, we might be able to rule out problems on our end.
jeff wrote: "We just made change yesterday that might fix this issue by removing a capacity block for shared hosts, which includes GoDaddy users. Could you give it a try and see if it works now? "Unfortunately, it didn't work using my existing API key and secret. I then regenerated my API key and secret, updated my user profile in my GoDaddy WordPress.org dashboard, and then tried to connect to Goodreads again. Still no luck. I get a message from the plugin that "The request to Goodreads failed."
I'm not sure what you mean by "the certificate info in PHP." I'm not very tech-savvy, to be honest, though I'm trying to learn. The last time we tried to solve this issue with Goodreads and GoDaddy, the developer of the Ultimate Book Blogger (UBB) plugins, Ashley, handled most of the communication with Goodreads. That exchange took place last winter. (You can see that discussion here: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...)
I may be able to pull Ashley in on this conversation, but as it's been over a year, I'm not sure I still have tech support with her. I will check.
The one thing we were sure of is that the problem isn't with the plugin I'm using, because people on other hosting sites are not having any problems. It does seem to be something to do with GoDaddy or Goodreads, and from the sound of it, GoDaddy is beginning to seem more likely.
Hi jeff,I just tried from the godaddy server. I got the same forbidden response.
{"head":{"title":"403 Forbidden"},"body":{"@attributes":{"bgcolor":"white"},"center":[{"h1":"403 Forbidden"
},"Server"]}}
Hoeever from hostgator hosting, it works fine.
Prakhar
Mod
I called go daddy with respect to this problem and they state that they cannot help with plugins.
Just got off the phone with godaddy, they stated that goodreads is probably using a port that is blocked at godaddy for security reasons. The ports that are not blocked are 80 25 and 21. Don't know what port goodreads is using or even where to find out. I'll also add this information to my request to Ashley, the developer for the UBB plugin. I also receive the 403 error when using goodreads to retrieve book info with the isbn.
Mod
Thanks for looking into the details for this. Did they say these were blocks on outgoing connections to ports on other servers?
If so, that would probably explain the problem. Port 80 is regular web traffic. Port 25 is SMTP (sending outgoing mail) and port 21 is FTP (upload/download files)
Goodreads API uses HTTPS requests. UBB appears to call on port 443 on Goodreads for HTTPS, which is pretty standard in general.
If they're blocking connections to outgoing connections to servers on those ports, that means that they're blocking most outgoing HTTPS connections in general. Any API requiring HTTPS would probably not be callable from GoDaddy.
There's not much we can do because our API connections require HTTPS. Maybe they'd be willing to make exceptions for specific user accounts if asked?
Thank you, Jeff. That at least gives me (Lark @ Bookwyrm's Hoard) something I can tell the folks at GoDaddy. Maybe it will help.
Godaddy did say the only way around it was to purchase a VPN connection but there was no guarantees that would work plus it's very expensive. They also said they would not consider opening the port on a case-by-case basis. I could call them again and question the port you mention for the https port and see what they say. The two times I've talked to them they pretend not to know what an API is or how it works. They also get caught up in the fact that since the API is connected to a plugin that it must be a problem with the plugin, they won't get past that.
They have also said that some people with the problem changed their goodreads password and that fixed the problem (their very short research while I waited on the phone and it was a different plugin). I don't believe changing the password will help.
The saga continues!
Was wondering if the link below is plausible in fixing the problems we're having with the 403 error? I'm not very good at doing the things they recommend but before I try want to know if it's something that's possible. Elegant Themes Blog
Getting the 403 Forbidden Error in WordPress? Here’s How to Fix It
http://elegantthemes.us7.list-manage....
I started facing a strange error recently. I am calling the search api with proper key and the search string. I am getting proper response in my local development machine.
When I moved the application to cloud server hosted by godaddy, the api requests started giving 403 forbidden error messages for all requests.
This seems bit strange to me as there is no difference in the code and only change has been in the environment. Only other problem that i can think of is that Goodreads could be blocking the requests from godday servers.
Can anyone help me out with this. I am using PHP -curl from apache servers hosted on godaddy. I have checked and re checked my api keys, so that is not a problem.
Also, the response is a regular html forbidden page response and not a json or xml based response. Please note again that the application works great from my local machine.
Thanks in advance,
Prakhar