How not to make an error page (was: OT: www.Amazon.com down?)

Fri Jun 6 19:22:25 UTC 2008

I see a 503 actually.

When down:
iWil:~ wschultz$ curl www.amazon.com
HTTP/1.1 503 Service Unavailable
Server: NS_6.1
Content-Length:62
Connection: close

iWil:~ wschultz$ wget -S www.amazon.com
--12:21:26--  http://www.amazon.com/
            => `index.html'
Resolving www.amazon.com... 72.21.206.5
Connecting to www.amazon.com|72.21.206.5|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response...
   HTTP/1.1 503 Service Unavailable
   Server: NS_6.1
   Content-Length:62
   Connection: close
12:21:26 ERROR 503: Service Unavailable.

-wil

On Jun 6, 2008, at 11:40 AM, Kevin Day wrote:

> On Jun 6, 2008, at 1:24 PM, Lasher, Donn wrote:
>
>> Checked, and doublechecked, not just me
>>
>> www.amazon.com returns:
>>
>> Http/1.1 Service Unavailable
>>
>> Anyone have a URL for a network/etc status page, or info on the  
>> outage?
>> Been that way for a while this morning.
>>
>> -donn
>>
>>
>
> Even worse, the page they're displaying is actually a HTTP 200  
> response code(OK/no error), with no "Don't cache this" header -  
> which means their error page is considered cacheable by some  
> browsers/proxies. So, you may find users who tried to visit Amazon  
> while they were down are still seeing it down long after they fix it.
>
> Lesson to high profile websites: add these to your error pages so  
> you don't have people complaining you're still down long after  
> you're fixed.
>
> * Don't return a 200 response code. Use 500 or 503. Nothing from 2xx  
> or 4xx.
> * Add a "Cache-control: no-cache, must-revalidate, max-age=0"  
> header, as well as an "Expires: 0" header for good measure.
> * If your server is really borked and you can't add headers at all,  
> add '<META HTTP-EQUIV="Pragma" CONTENT="no-cache">' to the <head>  
> section. That's not as good, but helps at least on the browser end.
> * If possible, add a timestamp to the page somewhere (even if it's  
> in an HTML comment) so you can troubleshoot with users still seeing  
> the error.
>
> -- Kevin
>
>