Website Error Numbers: 406 Error – Not Acceptable,500 Internal Server Error,403 Forbidden Error and 404 error not found pages

Website Error Numbers

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Website Error Numbers:

•  403 Forbidden Error
•  404 error not found pages
• 406 Error – Not Acceptable
• 500 Internal Server Error 

403 Forbidden Error

There are many different types of errors that can happen when building a website. One of the more common ones is the 403 Forbidden Error. Here we discuss this error and what you can do about it.
The two most common causes of a “403 Forbidden” error are:

• Incorrect File Permissions
• “No Index” in .htaccess file is improperly used

Correcting a 403 Forbidden Error

1. First, you will want to check the file permissions that each of your files has set. If a file or folder is set to “777” which is “world” writable for security reasons the 403 error will be displayed to protect your website from hacks. Folders should have the permissions set to “750” or “755” and files should be set to “644”
2. Once you have verified all the permissions are correct and the issue still persists, you will need to check your .htaccess file. Please keep in mind that you can have multiple .htaccess files in your account, so you may need to search / modify .htaccess files other than public_html/.htaccess. For example, if you have an addon domain located at public_html/addon_domain, you’ll need to check any .htaccess files within that folder as well. If one of the lines in the actual file says “Options All -Indexes” then simply remove “-Indexes” and save the file.

404 Error not found pages

In this article we’ll discuss the possible impact from the handling of 404 errors. These are caused by requests to pages or resources that don’t exist on the server.
By default a lot of the applications you might install on your website, will try to process requests for a page that doesn’t exist dynamically.
What this can mean, is each time someone mistypes a URL, your application is going to query the database to try to figure out if that page exists, and if it doesn’t it’s going to serve up a page not found error to the visitor.
In most cases this type of default 404 error page activity is completely harmless. However as the amount of 404 error pages you’re forcing the server to think about increases, it can become more and more problematic.
Causes of 404 errors
Let’s take a look at some of the most common reasons a 404 error might be generated.

• A visitor tries to manually type in a page that doesn’t exist.
• Your pages were not internally or externally linked correctly in the first place.
• Resources such as images, .css, .js, or other files were removed from the server.
• One of your pages was moved, and links either internal or external weren’t updated.
• Search engine crawlers, or automated bots try to access generic pages that your site doesn’t have.

404 error page handling
A good webmaster will want to periodically check on their website statistics to see what requests are generating the most 404 errors.
You can use this information to your advantage, as lets say for example you notice 500 people a month are trying to pull up a page called /about that doesn’t exist. You can go ahead then and create that page, or setup re-direction on that URL to hopefully get them pointed in the right direction and have them remain on your site during future visits.
Viewing 404 errors via Awstats

1. You can view your 404 errors via Awstats from within cPanel.Once you’re logged into Awstats, if you simply scroll to the very bottom of your statistics report, you should see the total number of 404s encountered and what percentage of your traffic that represents.Then simply click on the 404 link to see the actual requests triggering these errors.
2. In this example you can clearly see that the URL /directory/search-all.php is by far the biggest cause of the 404 errors on this site.You can also see that there are several resources such as .css stylesheets and .png and .gif images that are missing.Note the Referrer of these resources, as those would be the pages with the invalid links to these files that don’t exist.

Creating static custom 404 error pages and handling excessive requests
Now that we’ve seen a little bit about what a 404 error is, you might wish to dive deeper and configure a custom 404 error page to help steer your visitors to other sections of your site when then try to access a page that doesn’t exist.
Or if you’re having problems with too many 404 errors causing performance issues a static 404 error page can help with this as well. All of the following articles go more in-depth on handling 404 errors and would be recommended reading for anyone looking to get the total big picture on 404 error handling.

406 Error – Not Acceptable

There are many errors that you may see as you visit different websites across the web. One of the more common ones is the 406 – Not Acceptable error. This article explains the error, what causes it, and how to correct it if it happens on your site.
What is the 406 Error?
Web browsers make a request for information from the server. When this happens, it sends an Accept header. This tells the server in what formats the browser can accept the data. If the server cannot send data in a format requested in the Accept header, the server sends the 406 Not Acceptable error.
The error can also be generated by the mod_security module. Mod_security, a type of firewall program that runs on Apache web server, scans for violations of the rules it has set. If an action occurs that violates one of these rules, the server will throw a 406 error.
What caused this error on my site?
In regards to a site on your hosting account, the cause of the 406 error is usually due to a mod_security rule on the server. Mod_security is a security module in the Apache web server that is enabled by default on all hosting accounts. If a site, page, or function violates one of these rules, server may send the 406 Not Acceptable error.
How can I prevent it?
Mod_security can be turned off. You can also disable specific ModSecurity rules or disable ModSecurity for each domain individually. If you would like mod_security disabled you can disable mod_security via our Modsec manager plugin in cPanel.

Note! You may not have the option to enable or disable mod_security in your cPanel on VPS or Dedicated servers. To disable mod_security on accounts that don’t have the option in cPanel, you will need to use command line via SSH or contact your hosting provider to disable/enable it for you.

500 Internal Server Errors

The 500 Internal Server Error can be very frustrating because it is such a vague error. In addition to the error message text itself being vague, there are actually several different issues that can cause the 500 error message to appear. This can lead to headaches for troubleshooters.
What causes 500 Internal Server Errors?
Here are the three most common reasons:

1. Incorrect file permissons – Most commonly having a file as “world” writeable. This is a very common issue with PHP files. In general on our servers, PHP file permissions should not be higher than 775. Keep in mind too that the permissions of the parent folders/directories need to be set correctly too. See our File Permissons article for more information, including how to change those permissions.
2. Leaving file permissions set incorrectly after manual installation of content management systems, forums, blogs, etc.
3. Coding errors in the .htaccess file.

Correcting a 500 Server Error:
To track down what is causing the error, you will want to start with the error log in cPanel. Once you are logged into your cPanel look for and click on the “Error Log” icon under “Logs.”

For example, if I set a PHP file to 777 permisions (writeable by the world) this will cause a 500 Internal Server Error. I would be able to view something similar to the following in my Error Log:
[Tue Sep 20 08:18:01 2011] [error] [client 174.77.92.170] SoftException in Application.cpp:264: File “/home/username/public_html/concrete/index.php” is writeable by others
I would correct this by changing the permissions of the index.php file to 644.
Perl Scripts and 500 Errors
While a 500 error from a Perl script error may not be common, it can be even harder to track down because the cPanel Error Log does not tell us in this case what specifically caused the 500 error message. You will want to track down the code causing the error. It can even be something as simple as one missing character in your code. For instance, in the following code:

#!/usr/bin/perl
print “content-type: text/html \n\n”
print “Hello, PERL!”;

The second line is missing a semi-colon at the end, so:

print “content-type: text/html \n\n”

SHOULD BE…

print “content-type: text/html \n\n”;