GoDaddy, cURL, HTTP, and 403 Errors

I was recently coding PHP cURL functionality for a GoDaddy-hosted website and I kept running into an annoying 403 error. Essentially, GoDaddy’s proxy server (which they force you to use for cURL) was giving me a “Forbidden” error and wasn’t trying to hit the necessary server. Here’s the code that GoDaddy tells you to use for cURL transactions:

$URL='https://www.paypal.com';

$ch = curl_init();

echo 'URL = $URL <br>n';

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, 1);

curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPPROXYTUNNEL, TRUE);

curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_PROXYTYPE, CURLPROXY_HTTP);

curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_PROXY,'http://proxy.shr.secureserver.net:3128');

curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, FALSE);

curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $URL);

curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 120);

$result = curl_exec ($ch);

echo '<hr><br>n';

echo 'Errors: ' . curl_errno($ch) . ' ' . curl_error($ch) . '<br><br>';

echo '<hr><br>n';

curl_close ($ch);

print 'result - $result';

echo '<hr><br>n';

The problem is that since I’m not using SSL in this instance, I don’t need to use the following cURL option:

curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_HTTPPROXYTUNNEL, true);

Remember that if you receive this error from GoDaddy’s server. Hopefully I save someone a bunch of time with this