New Install Page Not Found with index.html in URL Bar

My first Sage theme coming along nicely:

But when I uploaded to the production server via FTP (I know, I know) the home page comes up with a 404. Troubleshooting, I replaced with Sage master files (after gulp of course) and still getting a url bar like: www.website.com/index.html and a 404.

Played around with

  1. deactivating Soil - nope

  2. activating core themes - there’s the posts

  3. setting home to static page - nope

  4. permalink settings - this was interesting 'cause on default settings message:

    The requested URL /index.html was not found on this server.

What noob mistake am I making, please?

Tried it on a different WP install (same server) and it’s working happily so apparently its an issue with either

  1. The WP install
  2. The WP Configuration
  3. List item

And the winner is: THREE, List Item.

I think it may have been a combination of:

  1. the fact that DNS isn’t actually connecting the IP and the URL and I’m just pointing there in my /etc/hosts file.

  2. These lines in the .htaccess

    AuthName thewebsiteurl.com
    AuthUserFile /path/to/service.pwd
    AuthGroupFile /path/to/service.grp

Not sure how those lines got there. (The server account is old, maybe I wanted it passwd protected at some point.) Commented them out, played around with permalinks a bit and we seem to be up and running properly.

Mercury retrograde.