Godaddy MVC Dot Net Website Error 403 - Forbidden: Access is denied Error

Updated on: May 27, 2021

When you have published your .NET application on GoDaddy hosting and after running website on the browser if you are getting error as: "403 - Forbidden: Access is denied", then try the following steps on GoDaddy Hosting to fix this issue:

Step 1: Check which Dot Net Framework version, your MVC website is running on in your Web.Config file, in our example it is currently set as 4.6.1 version.

Step 2: Go to Hosting Settings of the website as shown below, you can navigate to "Hosting Settings" from "Plesk Admin => Websites & Domains Settings:

Step 3: Once you navigate to "Hosting Settings", you can check for ASP.NET Framework Version from "Microsoft ASP.NET suppport (version) field as shown below, it should be set to the same or larger version that the version which you have set in your Web.Config, you can see it was previously set as Dot Net Version 3.5 and our website was configured for 4.6 Version, so because of this it was causing 403 Forbidden error.

Step 4:  You can now set the version which you expect as per your website configuration and click on "Apply" button and recheck your website whether it has started working or not. In our example we set it to 4.8 version and saved it and it started working.