The internet is a global village and its use has proved to be both noble and despicable. People’s lives have been changed using this modern technology and for others, their careers ruined. But little do we care to know that this amazing piece of tech runs on a 3-tier architecture of a client, web servers and the online database.
The Client is the Web browser we interact with daily and when you visit a website or blog to read some articles, the client makes a connection to the web servers through a network protocol called Hypertext Transfer protocol(HTTP). These network connections support sending requested data from the web servers back to the web browser including all the content of the web pages and some protocol control info.
And most times, we see a response saying a particular web page cannot be found (error 404) or no internet please try again later and we don’t seem to understand these status messages. Since “404” is normally a deleted web page, it’s one of the most commonly seen HTTP error codes but there are a whole bunch of these codes for web page errors with different reasons.
We shall briefly digest the most commonly displayed error messages and give you a summary of other status codes.
Types of HTTP Error and Status Codes
Only a few of the many possible error and status codes are seen on the internet. Codes related to errors are typically shown in a webpage where they are displayed as the output of a failed request, while other status codes are not displayed to users.
- 100-199: informational status
- 200-299: success status
- 300-399: redirection status
- 400-499: client errors
- 500-599: server errors
200(202)-Success
Most client request results in this status but users rarely see this code on the screen of their web browsers. This means the web server processed the request successfully and transmitted the content back to the client’s browser.
Error 400 Bad Request
A response of 400 Bad Request usually means the web server didn’t understand the request because of invalid syntax. Commonly, Error Code 400 is displayed due to entering the wrong URL in the browser and the client should not repeat the request without checking and making the necessary modifications.
Error 403- No permission to access file
The 403 Forbidden error is an HTTP status code that means that accessing the page or resource you were trying to reach is absolutely forbidden for some reason. This means you do not have the necessary permissions to access the resources you’re requesting. In most cases you are required to authenticate yourself using a username or password before you access the Home page.
Error 404-Page not found
A ‘404’ is the standard response when a particular web page cannot be found at all. The reasons could be:
- The entire site is currently down (test by seeing if the home page loads)
- That particular page has been deleted (as above – other pages will load)
- You have lost connection to the internet (test with a reliable site, like Google home page)
Error 500-Server errors
With HTTP error 500 Internal Server Error, the web server received a valid request from a client but was unable to process it. HTTP 500 errors occur when the server encounters some general technical glitch such as being low on available memory or disk space. Most times, the server administrator must fix this problem.
