Benefits of getting an email for each 404 error

I can't remember whose blog it was on but there was talk of getting emails every time you have a 404 error on your site. I think this is great for helping with development as far as making sure all your images are there, pages link properly, etc. but over the last few days I have found another benefit of them. 4 different IP's have tried to find mambo and wordpress vulnerabilities with my site by entering different page names and directory names. CPanel can ban an IP easily, so they are taken care of, only 1 attact this morning.

For the most part people look at the most popular pages using their stats programs but most don't look at their 404 error log. Your stats program will tell you what your customers are looking at, your 404 log file will sometimes tell you what the people who want to harm your business are looking at. By receiving the email it forces you to look at it in your inbox and then you are much more likely to deal with it. For that reason alone I think that getting the email is an important part of managing your site.

It only takes a couple of minutes to install a HTTP Error Contribution and its benifits have been shown to me a thousand times over already. Putting up with emails when you know you are missing a graphic can be annoying, but that is a small price to pay to find out who is trying to sneak through the back door.

Other ways to protect yourself is to make sure you rename your admin to something that no one would look for (virtually any key on the keyboard can be used and letters can be lower case or capitals). Make sure your admin is not indexed by SE's, rename your contact_us page, make sure you have your software up to date with all the fixes.

I keep thinking about a retail store, I can't see the owner standing at the front door watching for pickpockets while leaving the back door is wide open and the theifs have a 18 wheeler backed up and are loading it with the entire inventory. That would not happen in a retail store so why should it happen in a web store.