No More Scary Server Error Pages Please

Have you ever seen a scary stark white webpage with plain text that says there was some error? We’ve all seen those ugly server error pages that come bundled with most web server software. Server errors happen, it’s a fact of life, but why don’t Sys Admins make nicer looking one’s or better yet, why doesn’t Apache or Nginx come with better looking pages bundled in by default? I have a couple practical theories…

• Sys Admins, or that guy who setup your server isn’t a designer, he reads the command line all day so he really isn’t worried about how the error pages look.
• It’s a little awkward or not super simple to just slap a new HTML webpage in place for a server error page, there are lots of considerations that make these pages different than standard webpages like directory structures, image hosting, etc.

So I got a spark of energy the other day to make some new Error Pages for our Infra team so we don’t have these ugly pages on our servers at Pronto. One challenge I had for these pages is that they needed to be brand and domain agnostic, as in they had to work on any domain, but I wanted to show some domain specific information to the visitor to give them some pertinent content in an attempt to make the error page less scary. The pages also had to be imageless and all CSS had to be inline so anybody working on a server to implement one of these HTML pages to replace the default bundled page could do it relatively easily without thinking too hard.

Oh yeah, they’re responsive too, I made them with Bootstrap 3. 🙂

Here’s what I came up with, you can download all of them from github  – Server Error Pages.

Error Pages Demos

• 403 Forbidden Error
• 404 Not Found Error
• 500 Internal Server Error
• 502 Bad Gateway Error
• 503 Service Unavailable Error
• 504 Gateway Timeout Error
• Maintenance Page

So, these are you Infra guys, let’s make the web a little less scary when all hell breaks loose and your server is down. 😉

apache github nginx server error pages

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