incorrect redirect in .htaccess causing an infinite loop

My hosting company commented out a line in my.htaccess file which they say was causing a problem. After doing that, I found that password-protected pages now result in a 404 error page not found when entering a password.

I am using subdomains with domain mapping.

I received the following from my hosting company:
I did some digging further into the cause of this and as well as through the various error_logs on the server, it looks like this was being caused by an incorrect redirect causing an infinite loop. I’ve commented out the below line in your /home/lawfirm9/public_html/.htaccess

Redirect 301 /directory https://lawyerdirectory.lawfirm911.com

From the error_log there were a bazillion of these entries:
===
[Mon Apr 08 03:21:56 2013] [error] [client 95.135.61.182] Request exceeded the limit of 10 internal redirects due to probable configuration error. Use ‘LimitInternalRecursion’ to increase the limit if necessary. Use ‘LogLevel debug’ to get a backtrace.
[Mon Apr 08 03:21:56 2013] [error] [client 95.135.61.182] Request exceeded the limit of 10 internal redirects due to probable configuration error. Use ‘LimitInternalRecursion’ to increase the limit if necessary. Use ‘LogLevel debug’ to get a backtrace.
===

Your server’s load was extremely high and nearly unresponsive with
03:29:46 up 23 min, 1 user, load average: 62.51, 65.43, 40.52
And once .htaccess was disabled it started to go down as you can see here below.
03:32:30 up 25 min, 1 user, load average: 8.96, 39.91, 34.79
03:40:23 up 33 min, 1 user, load average: 2.01, 10.42, 22.22
03:50:00 up 43 min, 1 user, load average: 0.92, 2.00, 12.16

With that redirect disabled, the infinite internal redirects are not happening, and the server is running much smoother at this time. I would recommend reviewing the .htaccess file, in particular the line that is commented out. Since this is WordPress it may require some Rewrite conditional statements instead of just a 301.