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.

There are 5 different categories of possible status code messages:

• 1xx- Informational Response
• 2xx- Successful
• 3xx- Redirected
• 4xx- Request Error
• 5xx- Server Error

What exactly is the 2xx HTTP status code?

As it has been mentioned, this status code indicates that your request was successful. When it shows up, it means that the server received your request, understood it, accepted it and processed it. Most of the times this translates to a confirmation page that the server performed what you requested. It can also mean that Googlebot has successfully retrieved the robots.text file.

Several sub-categories of this status code pinpoint the exact response of the server:

200 – OK

As the name suggests, this is the typical response in the 2xx HTTP status code. It means that the request  has been successful. This is the ideal request response.

201 – Created

201 status code appears when a new resource has been successfully created. The status page also includes a list of the characteristics of the new resource and locations which the user can choose from.

202 – Accepted

This response indicates that a certain request to the server has been received and accepted, but it has not yet been processed or the processing has not been done fully yet. This is an intermediate response and the request might subsequently be acted upon or disallowed after it has been processed.

203- Non-Authoritative Information

As the name suggests, the 203 code is a form of a disclaimer. It indicates that the server has processed the request successfully but obtained its information from third party servers and as such it is non-authoritative.

204 – No Content

This means that the server has processed the request successfully but it is not able to return any content. This offen occurs when you click on a link which does not have any targeted URL.

205- Reset Content

The 205 status code is similar to 204 as it indicates that the server has found no content.

206 - Partial Content

In this case, the server has only been able to generate part of the requested information. An example of a 206 status code will be when a user presses the stop button before a page is fully loaded.

207- Multi Status

The 207 code is an XML message and has a number of different response codes in cases where there were a number of sub requests.

208- Already Reported

This response indicates that the contents of a particular DAV binding had already been included in a reply previously made to the same request and as such are not going to be mentioned again.

250 – Low On Storage Space

This is a warning that the server has received and accepted the request but it might not be able to fulfill it completely because it lacks sufficient storage space. Most of the times an estimate of the amount of space still available is given as well.

226 IM Used

The 226 code shows the result from a variety of manipulations applied when a GET request for a resource is fulfilled by the server.