I am trying to fix this issues I get a forbidden error when i try and type in my ip address error message Forbidden You don't have permission to access / on this server. I then checked the apache logs tail -f /var/log/apache2/error.log The error returned was: Directory index forbidden by Options directive: /var/www/ I have tried various approaches chown -R www-data: /var/www/mydirectory/public_html from what i understand from a simple explanation apache uses www-data as a user.