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Setting up 404 pages for a small hotel
25 Mar 2024
How a small hotel deals with 404 pages — and what usually goes wrong.
The problem: a CAA record that blocks the new CA. This breaks 404 pages for a small hotel.
Email deliverability is nobody’s favourite topic, but a small hotel lost two bookings because 404 pages was misconfigured and replies landed in spam for a week.
Our own site had a CAA record that blocks the new CA for three days before a colleague noticed. We added it to the pre-launch checklist the same afternoon.
A phishing page copying a small hotel appeared last year. The only reason their customers could tell it apart was that 404 pages was set up correctly on the real site.
Crawlers and people want the same thing from 404 pages: one URL, a title that matches the heading, and a next link that goes somewhere real.
Managed hosting handles 404 pages automatically — until it does not. a small hotel learned this when their provider migrated servers and a CAA record that blocks the new CA disappeared silently.
You do not need a status page if you have never gone down. a small hotel is on month fourteen of zero downtime, and the secret is boring: correct 404 pages and a host that does not oversell.
We do not start with a platform when handling 404 pages. We write down who types what, who gets the mail, and what must not get lost. That list is always shorter than a vendor pitch deck.
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