Error Pages

The error pages feature of cPanel allows you to configure Apache to display custom error pages that you have created for display when your website suffers some sort of error or problem; this means that if your website endures a problem, an informative error page will be shown to the visitor containing your website’s design, meaning that your website can still retain its corporate identity even during a problem whether it be with the website’s code or one with the server on which the website is hosted. Custom error pages mean that you can display a custom message to visitors when a problem occurs with your website or the server that it is hosted on; this means that you can display an informative message to your users which you have written yourself, and not an uninformative message which has been generated automatically by the server which you are hosted on - automatically generated error messages are normally very technical and are usually of no use to the visitor or the person who is viewing the message unless they either have a sufficient amount of technical knowledge to understand the server, or if you are the server administrator who can then take the necessary action to rectify the problem if it is within a script that is hosted within your web space, or contact your web host with information of the problem if it happens to be a server side one which you are unable to fix yourself since you are on shared hosting, therefore meaning that you have no root or administrator access to the hosting server. cPanel allows you to setup custom error pages for five of the most common website and server side errors which could occur with either your website and the code that has been used to create it, or with the main host node on which your shared cPanel website hosting account is hosted; the error codes which can have custom error pages are 400, 401, 403, 404 and 500 - a 400 error normally refers to a bad gateway which means that a connection can’t be established to the server on which your website is hosted, a 401 error is one which will ask somebody for login details in order for them to be able to access either a password protected directory or file which you have hosted within your shared cPanel website hosting account, a 403 error will be displayed when someone has tried to gain access to either a protected directory or file to which they are not allowed access, a 404 error page will be shown when a visitor tries to reach a directory or file under your domain name that doesn’t exist and a 500 error page will be displayed when there is an internal problem with either the code in which a page has been produced with or with the server itself which means that the directory, page or file that is trying to be accessed can’t be processed and in turn displayed properly because of either a code or server problem.

Posted on April 6th, 2008 by Nete-Quette
Filed under: Hosting