UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Dear All,
I do not know anything from UNIX and its systems. I have a course on bioinformatics and they taught us a little about the UNIX. They also provided a userID and password for the web server which I can access using SSH.
now, with A LOT OF EFFORT, I wrote a small index.html file, saved it in my mac and transferred it to my UNIX account using scp command. now the problem is that I can't access it via my web browser. the error 403 is shown. I tried chmod command several times but the problem stays the same. this is what I get when I want to access the index.html file:
You don't have permission to access /~username/ on this server.

Apache/2.2.3 (Unix) PHP/5.2.0 mod_ssl/2.2.3 OpenSSL/0.9.7d Server at

I feel that my problem is really stupid. But I do not know anything about these stuff. Please help me

You really should talk to your local webmaster. Different web servers can be configured differently. Also telling exactly what you did with the chmod command would help. My guess is that you used chmod to fiddle with the permissions on your index.html file. You may need to change the permissions on your home directory. Sign on, make sure you are in your home directory then try "chmod 755 .". Yes you need that dot. Like this:
chmod 755 .
But again, I am guessing without much info to go on.