Cpanel Password Protection: it worked, I did nothing, and now it doesn’t

  • I have just nearly completed a web site conversion for multiple networks of schools under my one domain https://www.ethical-literacy.org. We were anxious to get them going on the wordpress platform to begin collaborating with each other–since they are from all over the US and Canada. However, some of the material they are using is proprietary so we have sub directories on the site which are password protected using our Cpanel Password Protection.

    Everything was going smoothly, until 24 hours ago. I was not experiencing any of issues for the 4-months prior to this while I was building the site. I sent everyone there access information two weeks ago, and now, all of the password protected directories are coming up in browsers with “Page Not Found” errors. If I remove the password protection managed by cpanel the pages can be seen again–however, I need to keep the content protected and from a management perspective using the cpanel protection is easiest.

    I spoke to my web site host (inmotionhosting.com) to check to see if our site had been hacked, or if they had made any updates to the cpanel software that would be causing the issue–and they have concluded that it is a coding error having to do with WordPress. They could not respond to my question as to why it had been working all along and all of a sudden it isn’t. They suggested that wordpress did an update that caused an error, I am skeptical of that response, as I have not upgraded versions in the last 24-hours.

    We talked through it being an httaccess issue and determined that it isn’t that either.

    Also, I have made no changes to the sub directories that have been universal–as they all are running on separate installations of wordpress.

    Any suggestions?

    Many thanks.

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  • Have you tried:

    – deactivating all plugins to see if this resolves the problem? If this works, re-activate the plugins one by one until you find the problematic plugin(s).

    – switching to the default theme to rule out any theme-specific problems?

    Thread Starter ethical-literacy

    (@ethical-literacy)

    esmi- thanks I have tried both of those suggestions and no such luck. Any other hunches that you might be willing to offer?

    Try contacting your hosts and asking if anything was changed on the server that might have impacted on your password protection 5 days ago.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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