I'm just guessing at this, from your symptoms, but when you go to a root directory on an html server, there are default file names which get loaded by default when you access the url. For example, if you access http://www.whatever.com, the server actually looks for http://www.whatever.com/index.html. These filenames are set in the server configuration or in your .htaccess file. It seems like the index.html file is either non-existant or has wrong permissions on it.