Creating Custom Error Pages on Freeola Web Hosting

Welcome to the Freeola Internet customer support pages. This guide is designed to help with creating custom error pages for your website. For more internet help topics please visit our main Support Guides Page.

There are many situations where errors may be encountered by visitors of your website. When these errors occur, usually the visitor is sent to a standard Freeola error page describing the issue.

As the web designer, you may prefer to have your own error pages in place which fit to the style of your website and allow the visitor to be pointed in the right direction after being informed that the error was encountered.

Your visitors could encounter an error page in any of the following situations:

• When creating a website which may change regularly, or has previously used a different structure, you may find that users that attempt to access pages which no longer exist and are shown a standard Freeola 404 error page. Causes of this error may include outdated links from other sites, outdated bookmarks, or outdated search engine listings.

• If you are password protecting some directories within your website, and a visitor attempts to access these directories without the correct login details, they may encounter a 401 error page informing them that authorisation is required.

• If you have not yet uploaded a website, or have directed the visitor to an empty directory, a 403 access forbidden error may display.

• On websites which run several scripts, it is possible one they may fail due to a scripting issue. If this happens the visitor would be sent to an error 500 page advising them that there was an internal issue or an issue running a script.

The following guide will explain how you can put these custom pages in place using a Freeola Web Hosting Subscription.

• SSD, SSD WP & SSD Pro Hosting

• VIP+, VIP WP & VIP SQL Hosting

• Standard Hosting, using an HTACCESS file

You can change to custom error pages on your website through the cPanel tools which can be accessed easily through the managing MyFreeola Control Panel.

Once logged in, expand the Website & Hosting menu option, then click SSD Hosting.

On the following page, click Quick Login next to your SSD Hosting subscription to immediately be taken to the cPanel Homepage.

From the cPanel menu, scroll down to the Advanced section and click Error Pages.

The following page will allow you to select a common error page to edit, while also giving the option to show all error status codes.

After selecting your desired error page, you will be take to a page where you can create your HTML page. To design this, you can enter your code within the provided field, making use of the pre-defined tags if desired, or 'copy and paste' your HTML code from another source.

Once you have created your page, click Save to save your design. Visitors who trigger your selected error page will now see your custom page.

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If you have VIP Web Hosting from Freeola you can set up custom error pages from within your MyFreeola account.

To do this, you will need to login to your MyFreeola account and select VIP Web Hosting from the left hand navigation, found under the Web Sites & Hosting header. Then press Go To Settings from beside the relevant hosting package to be taken to the hosting control panel.

From here, you will need to select Set-up Error Pages to be taken to the Custom Error Pages configuration.

For each Error Type, you will be given the option to select a page from your uploaded files to display when a visitor generates the respective error. Once you have made your selections, click Apply.

A guide on uploading files via FTP can be found here.

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If you would prefer, it is possible to set custom error pages using an .htaccess file, although is only recommended for more advanced users who are not using our paid-for Freeola Web Hosting services.

The steps for doing this are as follows.

1. Firstly you would need to open Notepad (or your favourite text editor) and create a file called .htaccess.
   

   Warning

   If you already have a .htaccess file on your website hosting, you would need to add the following to the bottom of the existing file.

2. You would then need to add a line of code in the following format for each error code that you would like a custom page for, where XXX is the error code and errorpage is the location of the error page within your htdocs directory.
   
   ErrorDocument XXX /errorpage
   
   Examples of this in practice could be as follows:
   
   ErrorDocument 404 /error404.html
   
   Any visitors that follow and outdated link to a no longer active page will be sent to a document called error404.html within htdocs.
   
   ErrorDocument 403 /forbidden.html
   
   This will send any users that attempt to access something that they are not permitted to, to a page called forbidden.html within htdocs.
   
   ErrorDocument 500 /errordocs/scripterror.html
   
   If there is a scripting error, the visitor will be sent to a page called scripterror.html within an errordocs folder inside htdocs.

3. Finally you should upload the new (or edited) .htaccess file to the htdocs directory on your hosting. You can then test each of the error scenarios by creating situations where these errors would occur. For example, visiting a page that does not exist to test your error 404 page.