Server unable to read htaccess file, denying access to be safe

I am very new to centos (Debian usually), and on my cpanel / whm server, i got this error

Forbidden

You don't have permission to access / on this server.
Server unable to read htaccess file, denying access to be safe

Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

Something seemed seriously wrong, I had already chowned all the files

chown -R techg:techg public_html

I also even deleted the htaccess file, but still, the server was reporting the error.

The solution turned out to be making the public_html directory executable

I found that out through the apache log files that read

[Sun Mar 06 02:48:10.894154 2016] [core:crit] [pid 1261] (13)Permission denied: [client 46.xxx.216.169:55886] AH00529: /home/techg/public_html/.htaccess pcfg_openfile: unable to check htaccess file, ensure it is readable and that ‘/home/techg/public_html/’ is executable