The apache’s default “404 Error not found” page seems ugly. And may some hosting service put theire ads in it. We can add some entry in .htaccess to change the defualt 404 error page. This method can also be used for some other error codes. A list of the server returned codes can be found in Table 1.

It simply need to add the “ErrorDocument” command to the .htaccess file. The format is:

    ErrorDocument code /dir/file.ext
    or
    ErrorDocument code http://mydomain.name/dir/file.ext

For example:

    ErrorDocument 404 /404.html

would cause any error code resulting in 404 to be forwarded to mydomain.name/404.html

    ErrorDocument 404 http://pkill.info/404.html

would cause any error code resulting in 404 to be forwarded to http://pkill.info/404.html

For other error code such as 401 the method is the same. But not all the returned code should be forwarded. Most of the time, forwarding the error codes is enough.

Table1: Server returned codes

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