Amazon CloudFront CDN: Goodbye 404 Messages

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

The Amazon Web Services content delivery network CloudFront wants to give its subscribers a way to present a more meaningful message than "server not found" when their users encounter a bad link.  CloudFront now lets subscribers customize the infamous 404 message so people trying to visit their business site won’t be left with the baffling dead end that "server-not-found" messages so often represent.

"We’ve added two new features that allow to you to configure how CloudFront handles error responses for your website. Error responses can occur for many reasons. For instance, a user might request objects that don’t exist (and receive a 404 Not Found response)," wrote AWS staff in announcing the service. "Or a user you haven’t authorized might attempt to download an object you have secured using CloudFront’s private content feature (and receive a 403 Forbidden response)."…

The Custom Error Pages service lets the CloudFront business user take the anonymity out of the error page messages by putting the company logo on the page. It also allows a more informative message, such as the URL for another part of the website or guidance to the page that the business concludes the user was actually seeking. If such precise guidance can’t be ascertained, then a more static page that gets the user back onto the Web site can be a fallback position…

Read more from the source @ http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/amazon-cloudfront-cdn-goodbye-404-messag/240162031