Xmlhttp request is raising an Access Denied error

Question

The following Excel macro, which is making an xmlhttp request to this webpage to retrieve some values at a second stage, has worked normally in VBA until some time ago:

Answer 1

I'm afraid I don't understand exactly why this problem occurs, but I'm guessing it is the secure "https://" versus insecure "http://". I ran into the same "access denied" message while following sample code from a VBA course. The original code was:

XMLPage.Open "GET", "http://x-rates.com/table/?from=GBP&amount=3", False    
XMLPage.send

I changed the "http://" to "https://" and the error went away.

Answer 2

This works for me:

With CreateObject("MSXML2.ServerXMLHTTP.6.0")
  .Open "GET", URL, False
  .Send
  content = .ResponseText
End With

Answer 3

Use

CreateObject("MSXML2.ServerXMLHTTP.6.0") 

The standard request fired from a local machine forbids access to sites that aren't trusted by IE. MSXML2.ServerXMLHTTP.6.0 is the server-side object, that doesn't perform those checks.