Have you ever run into an annoying message ‘404 (requested page not found)’ while browsing through your website's monitoring results?

Well, that is just an example of the many HTTP status codes that exist. HTTP status codes refer to the responses a client gets from a server to a particular request. These codes are generated while a user tries to access a particular web page via a particular browser or while search engine spiders such as Googlebot make their way onto the page.

On the World Wide Web, one of the most common acronyms that you will encounter is HTTP, which stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol. This is considered the center of data and information exchange on the web. HTTP is an application protocol that acts as a request-reply system that involves a client and a server. Request-reply or request-response is one of the simplest ways used by computers to communicate with each other. The original version of HTTP, officially called the HTTP/1.0 was revised into HTTP/1.1. However, since the inception of the first version, status codes have already been present.

One of the most prominent status codes is the 1xx, but before you get to know about what exactly 1xx is, it is important that you understand first what status codes are. In HTTP/1.0 and the subsequent versions of the protocol, whenever a request is performed, a response is triggered. The request methods include GET, HEAD, and POST. When the HTTP/1.1 came out, five new methods were introduced. These are OPTIONS, DELETE, TRACE, CONNECT, and PUT. Methods namely HEAD, GET, TRACE, and OPTIONS pose no harm to the server and thus, they are considered “safe methods.” On the other hand, POST, DELETE, and PUT may give adverse effects on the server and sometimes on transactions and other transmissions.

Have you gotten your head wrapped around everything related to website management? You need to be familiar with a lot of new things like DNS, nameservers, A records, and that is not even considering the CMS you should use. This whole enchilada is no joke – it takes a serious amount of time to learn everything but once you learn about it, the whole investment is worth it.

There is, however, a way around the long process – learn piecemeal. It may not be the best way to learn, but with the constant pressure of website management, it really is the only way. If you need to test MX records, you really do not need to know about domain names and the W3C guidelines, restrictions and issues. You don't even need to know why your mail server entries have to end with a period. But you do need to follow instructions carefully, blindly and faithfully. Otherwise, you will have to learn everything if something goes wrong.

If you're having issues with your network connection, you may need to investigate exactly where the problem is occurring. Maybe your data packets are getting stopped right out of the gate, or maybe it's just a particular route that they're taking that is causing the issues.

A traceroute test shows the exact path that you're taking when you're trying to connect to a specific IP. This information tells you exactly where the breakdown happens, and it can aid you in trying to fix it.