Customize error messages on Sitehost

Sitehost account owners can customize error messages to provide more information about a problem or redirect website visitors to another location.

The Apache webserver software used on Sitehost contains an ErrorDocument directive that allows you to control the error response that visitors of your website will see. Instead of outputting the default error message, you can redirect visitors to another location where you can have a customized error message or a problem report form.

Apache configuration options

You can configure Apache to do one of four things in the event of errors:

Output a simple hard-coded error message
Output a customized message
Redirect to a local (relative) URL to handle the error
Redirect to an external URL to handle the error

The first option is the default configuration. Options 2-4 are configured within the .htaccess file.

Customize error messages

First, create HTML files (web pages) for each of your custom error messages. These error pages may be located anywhere within your web directory structure and must be accessible via a web browser (that is, world-readable).

Second, create an .htaccess file in your web directory to specify what page should display when a particular error is encountered. Replace the file name with your own file name. If you already have an .htaccess file (to password-protect a directory, for example), add the ErrorDocument lines to the end of it.

UITS recommends supplying a full URL when writing the ErrorDocument directive, with the exception of the ErrorDocument 401 and ErrorDocument 404 directives, which should use the format /filename.

For example:

 ErrorDocument 401 /subscription_info.html ErrorDocument 403 http://dept.indiana.edu/forbidden.html ErrorDocument 404 /error/404.html ErrorDocument 500 http://dept.indiana.edu/error.html

Note:

The URL in the 401 and 404 directive is just like a full URL, with http://www.indiana.edu deleted. The leading / is essential.

When you specify an ErrorDocument that points to a remote URL (that is, anything with a method such as http or https in front of it), Apache will send a redirect to the client to tell it where to find the document, even if the document is really located on the same server. This is a result of the nature of the HTTP basic authentication scheme.

If you want to provide different error messages for various areas of your site, you can put a different, customized .htaccess file into any subdirectory.

Here are some of the most common error codes for which you may want to provide custom messages:

Error code	Meaning
401 Unauthorized	The request did not have the proper authorization; the client should supply the correct authorization when requesting this URL again
403 Forbidden	The request did not specify the file name, or the directory or the file does not have the permission that allows the pages to be viewed from the web
404 Not Found	Document at the specified URL does not exist
500 Internal Server Error	In most cases, this error results from a problem with the code or program you are calling rather than with the web server itself.

For more error codes, see Common HTML error codes.