I've found a few other posts w/ people who seemed to be having similar problems as I am experiencing, however none of the fixes they recommend seem to be doing the trick.

I've created an empty rails app. I SSH'd in, performed this from the root


Then I followed the instructions to create a symlink to the app.


Then I should be able to hit the site and see the rails welcome page, instead I get a 403 Forbidden error.

http://76.12.220.229/demo/

Am I doing something incorrectly?

I suppose the forums aren't too active. I'll try contacting support and see if they have any suggestions and post them back here if I have any luck.

I contacted HMS support and they have fixed the issue I was experiencing.

They informed me that they enabled FollowSymLinks and allowed .htaccess to override settings.

I am a bit ignorant to exactly what these mean. I am also unsure if they were things that I could personally control or things HMS needed to set up on my account.

Once I learn more I'll post back with that information. In the future if anyone else experiences these issues, try contacting support. They handled my ticket VERY fast and fixed the issue.

Confirmation: Yes. The aforementioned tweaks on my account did have to be done by HMS staff on the server.