Professional Microsoft IIS 8

IIS 8.0 Error Pages

Like previous versions of IIS, IIS 8.0 can point to customized error pages. These can be created uniquely for your environment to allow you to customize what the end users see when they encounter an error—to hide the error details and display a friendly page that looks like the rest of the site. You can also create it to send detailed information to you when there is a failure. Custom error pages can be set for each HTTP status code and optionally substatus codes (status codes are covered in a later section).

IIS 8.0 can return two types of errors:

• Custom errors—Custom errors are errors that regular end users of the website will see. They contain a brief description of the error but should not contain any sensitive information that you do not want an end user to see. Because you can customize this, you can put as little or as much on this page as you want. Generally, however, it should hide the real error and display a friendly page to the end user.
• Detailed errors—Detailed errors contain a wealth of information meant for local administrators and developers. Because a detailed error can contain sensitive information about the error, it should not be shown to end users. Detailed errors are meant to provide valuable information to the administrators and developers to help troubleshoot failures and errors on the server.

IIS 8.0 has a convenient method of displaying a different error to end users than to administrators and developers. This method was modeled by ...