The most popular server errors we’ve met while checking the web for broken links are:

• Request/server exceeded time limit. Surprisingly this is a very common error. Perhaps too many webmsters forgot to optimize their scripts or databases? Seeking into archive too deep? We can’t guess the real problem, but the lesson is check your old pages/scritps if they are still working, can handle the current load, and if your website’s archives are available.
• Can’t connect to SQL – is a very common problem. And this type of errors are fixed very fast, because they are easy to spot since they are affecting almost the whole site.
• Error in SQL query – is a less noticeable message than SQL server errors, but it is easy to fix as well.
• CMS error pages. These are the most informative ones. Developers usually forget to turn off debug messages. These are very dangerous, because they provide so much information for possible hackers.
• Down for scheduled maintenance. Such common and simple pages like this usually show random error numbers like 404, 500 and so on.

Worst solutions to the 5xx error pages

• Trying to show site’s main page. Actually sites like this try to show their main page everywhere: it’s for a 404 page, for any 5xx page, etc. Most of the time this appears as a big mess to a site’s visitor and does not provide any valuable information about what he can do next (if he wants to stay on the same page).
• JavaScript popups with debug messages. Common?!
• Showing return to the original page when the “original page” link points to the same page user is at.

5xx error screenshots we made for you

Clean and simple error page

Internal server error (problem description in Japanese)

Wordpress maintenance mode plugin in action. Website is down for maintenance

AT&T suggests users to return to the original page, but this time button leads visitors to the same page

Talking to aliens? Are BOF or EOF the names of your mothership? And what should your website’s user do now?

Nice looking server error page

Something blew up on digg’s server. One of the shortest error pages we’ve discovered.

Django gives a very detailed (and nice looking) report of what’s happened, but on production sites do not forget to turn that thing off in order not to tease hackers.

Drupal – site is down for maintenance.

Geocities is down. Nice and useful error page from Yahoo. But the title is a bit misleading. Isn’t it?

Server error. Because some of the text is bold red – we guess that something serious has happened.

Sweet and clean. In Russian.

Maxim tries to be funny.

An error happened in mod_python. The big snake is not happy.

MSDN tries to be helpful.

Even social networks go down.

Oh, database is not accessible.

Parallels – internal server error.

jQuery – no such file in repository (why not 404 then?)

Out of operation.

Being helpful and informative.

Ruby fails

Very nice design (actually we see this page for all errors on that site and we love how it looks)

Site offline. Gray color is back into fashion this year.

Oh, so we are the robot? And you are a brick without soul goddammit Gooogle!!!

Look! Robot’s lost its head!

Tomcat broke.

Site is under construction.

Lions!

Something wrong at Yahoo!

XSL file not found.

Common and very annoying errors are:

• Huge 404 pages
  A user is supposed to wait while 50kb or larger hmtl stuffed with irrelevant pictures loads just to see a message that there is no page he was looking for.
• Missing scripts and/or images
  Some developers just clone their 404 pages from their sites’ codes forgetting to fix file paths. Result: ugly and broken error pages.
• Misleading error messages
  These sound like: “This item is no longer available for sale. Search for this item in the search box.” (If this item is no longer available what should I search for? And was your faq.php for sale?), “There are no tickets to this event” and similar.
• Full-page ads
  Well, these are no errors actually, but it is not too polite to show a full page ad for 5 to 20 seconds and then redirect a user to a non existing page.
• Automatic redirects
  Some websites show their error pages for 3 – 5 seconds telling that the user will be redirected to the main page. Where the error page is stuffed with other content and error message is a thin line hidden somewhere between banners and 100+ line long sitemap. If you are showing error message – get user some time to read it, because sometimes it’s hard to understand why you are redirected out of the sudden.
• Showing completely different content instead of the old one (while website headers return 404)
  This technique is very extensively used among news sites. And sometimes it’s hard to get why I see an article about shoes when I clicked the link to hat fashion article.

But we’ve also found many nice 404 page designs that really help users who are lost on the internet highway. And here we’ll show you some of our findings:

5ives.com

A Buddhistic message to the visitor

campaignmonitor.com

Clean design and helpful suggestions on what a visitor should do next

dainese.com

Would you be scared ?

addons.mozilla.org

Clean, helpful and beautiful

0at.org

Were you looking for a bat holding a balloon?

fi.bemmu.com

Cute anime girl pointing to you that there is nothing you were looking for

newyorker.com

Old-school highway drawing. The road to nowhere

getmefast.com

Just a nice design

action-electronics.com

Warning: they have a webmaster who may be coding their site while drunk

ibiblio.org

A very neat description in all the possible languages

meish.org

Kitty stole your web page…

thedisneyblog.com

Danger, Donald Duck!

current.com

No happy ending on the internet highway. Maybe you didn’t click hard enough?

vimeo.com

No more information available

cityofheroes.com

A very videogame-like design of 404

observer.com

Another black and white old-school drawing

laughingsquid.com

Tentacles “locating a page” in the pool

marksandspencer.com

Suggesting for what you may be looking for

palmbeachpost.com

You got bounced over to this beach

productplanner.com

A green school board, white chalk, 404

psphacks.net

ASCII art

reddit.com

A broke reddit character

scrapblog.com

Pink, beach, girly. Have you lost your way?

crowdspring.com

The site owners feel embarrassed about their errors

vanityfair.com

Diplomacy on the shoestring: blame the third party!

versionsapp.com

Plain and simple

secure.wufoo.com

Dinosaur shouting out “404!”

Yahoo! News

Extremely helpful: if they can’t find what you’re looking for, they redirect you to Yahoo!’s search page