This morning my website stopped working properly and came up with a pop up saying that I needed to save or open the index page (and all other html) pages, preventing anyone getting on the site. My hosting service were useless and didn't help at all, and after some desperate and clueless searching I found a couple of suggestions about things that might be in the htaccess file. So I fiddled with it a bit and got it working, even though I hadn't changed anything in it previously (to my knowledge) However, I'm now worried that what I took out might be problematic. I haven't seen anything on the site to say that is the case but realise it could be more behind the scenes. The text I removed was this: AddType application/x-httpd-php .htm .html AddType text/html htmlRewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^essexmums.org$ [OR] Code (markup): Can anyone tell me what that means/did and whether it was a mistake to remove it?
The second line you have there looks messed up, the rewrite rule wouldn't be on a line with Addtype... The first line simply told the server that it should use the PHP interpreter to process files ending in either .html or .htm. If you have php code included in files with those extensions then you need to put that line back into place. If all of your php scripts end in .php and the only thing in .html or .htm files are pure html then it won't matter.
I don't think I do but am not 100% sure. I just tried readding AddType application/x-httpd-php .htm .html Code (markup): and it's messing up the html pages again. Any idea why that might be?
Because it is processing them as php, which under normal circumstances should not be a problem at all, however, there could be a problem with your php setup.