Common Apache Errors on a Web Hosting

403 Forbidden

You may encounter an Error 403 with web hostings in the following event:

  • No index page has been defined in the repository, which therefore causes the following error in Apache’s logs:

[Mon Nov 25 09:33:29.272185 2013] [autoindex:error] [pid 2502:tid 2981512099584] [client 2001:4b98:x:x:x] AH01276: Cannot serve directory /srv/data/web/vhosts/domain.example.com/htdocs/: No matching DirectoryIndex (index.php,index.html,index.htm) found, and server-generated directory index forbidden by Options directive

By default, the Apache web server delivers the page named index.html or index.php at the root of the directory, as the homepage. Consequently, if you encounter this error, you need to rename the homepage of your website to be index.html or index.php. If you do not want to modify the name of the file of your homepage, you can also add the directive DirectoryIndex in a .htaccess file located at the root location.

Failed to read from backend server

[Mon Aug 19 15:01:55.242179 2013] [:error] [pid 412:tid 2997121103616] (104)Connection reset by peer: [client 2001:4b98:x:x:x] FastCGI: failed to read from backend server

This error indicates that the Apache service did not get a response from the interpreter (PHP, node.js, Python, etc.) and so it was unable to deliver the requested page. When this error occurs, you should analyze the interpreter’s logs in order to search for the error that is at the origin of the problem. To find the corresponding logs, it is recommended that you get the information from the date and time in the logs.

SIGUSR1 received. Doing graceful restart

[Mon Sep 21 23:44:09.650215 2015] [mpm_event:notice]
[pid 188:tid 2945215190848] AH00493: SIGUSR1 received.  Doing graceful restart

The warning messages “SIGUSR1 received. Doing graceful restarts” is normal and is related to the log rotation. This has no impact on site performance.