O perigo de uma página 404 personalizada

One customer running a single WordPress was using a 4x vCPUs instance on Amazon AWS®. Mas o uso de CPU e carga era tão alto, sem razões aparentes (o número de visitantes era razoável). Contudo: cada 404 desencadeou um enorme consumo de CPU e largura de banda! Um teste foi realizado e o 404 was replaced by a flat and tiny 324 bytes HTML file. The result: the instance size could be divided by two, so halving all expenses (including the bandwidth).

When using a custom 404-page: one should not forget that even a simple dead link to an image will trigger an expensive and huge HTML code being returned to the browser, resulting in sluggish speeds for the visitors as well!

Em outras palavras: do not do it, even if it looks pretty to the eyes.