Newbie question about index.htm

[tkwon]

I created an index.htm and placed it in the top directory of my subdomain. When I try http://www.mysubdomain.com/
I get the following error:
Forbidden

You don't have permission to access / on this server.

Additionally, a 500 Internal Server Error error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

However, when I try http://www.mysubdomain.com/index.htm the page opens properly. Why isn't the index.htm opening by default? I've also tried index.html.

What I have is
mydomain
mysubdomain (set up as add on domain)

The index.htm is placed in the root directory of mysubdomain. So /public_html/mysubdomain/index.htm

Also the permissions are set to 644 which I believe is correct.

[farcaster]

Since you are getting a 500 error, I would suggest that you start with the .htaccess - here's a helpdesk article that talks about it

https://www.bluehost.com/cgi/help/594