Okay, so I was trying to build my website on IIS (Microsoft’s Internet Information Services) and I kept getting Access denied by ACL on resource at a certain point. Every single google search result said “check the permissions on your folder”, and there was never a follow-up post. Needless to say, it didn’t work for me. I spent hours trying to fiddle with the permissions, and eventually I compared the permissions to that of a folder that did not have the problem, and they were completely identical. So I did some thinking.

What solved the problem for me is that I had a folder called “xyz.com” – the same as the name of the website. As soon as I renamed the folder and took the “.com” off the folder name (I renamed the folder to “xyz”), it suddenly worked!

I suspect that IIS was reading the “.com” ending of the name and thinking it was an executable – in windows, .COM and .EXE are executable files… but to the best of my knowledge, this doesn’t apply to directories! Stupid IIS!

I hope this helps someone else out there in the IIS world. Please leave a comment if it helped you!