jquery ajax xmlhttprequest cannot load,XMLHttpRequest cannot load. No 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' ...

This seems to be a pretty common question on here, and I've through a couple dozen threads on the topic. However, none of the responses have worked for me so far. Basically I have a page with a jQuery/AJAX script that pulls a couple

elements from an external (cross-domain) page.

I've tried putting this in my .htaccess file:

Header set Access-Control-Allow-Origin "*"

as well as:

Header set Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *

but no luck. My AJAX call is:

$.ajax({

type: 'GET',

url: 'url', //I have the actual URL here of course

cache: false,

contentType: 'text/plain',

dataType: 'html',

crossDomain: true,

success: function( data ) {

//doing stuff with data in here

}, error: function(jqXHR, textStatus, errorThrown) {

alert('critical error. everything is exploding. abort mission.');

}

});

Everything works perfectly when I run the page from my desktop, but from the actual hosted server, the console error in Chrome reads:

"XMLHttpRequest cannot load http://external_url.com. No 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header is present on the requested resource. Origin 'http://my_url.com' is therefore not allowed access.

Any ideas?