There is nothing in the world, which haven’t build without any errors. We humans, considered as the most valuable thing in the world have many errors or defects. Then how humans can make anything without any issues?
Today we are suppose to cover an important issue related to networks and websites. If you are and Internet surfer, you surely have seen some type of “504 errors“.  Before going to deal more about error 504, you may have to understand the basic idea about how a website and corresponding servers works. Here is the brief idea about how items are loaded to a website if someone interacts with it.

How a website and its servers works if an interaction is received?

This is an add-on tip for those who have no basic knowledge about the working of a website and web-server. Without knowing what is happening behind a website, no one could understand about 504 gateway timeout errors. Here is the most simplified form of a website working once it is hosted in a web server.
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Step 1:- We are connecting to a website using our web browser [Chrome, IE, Mozilla, Opera etc.]
Step 2:- Then we are providing our browser a URL address eg: http://firstandgeek.com/document.html

Here the URL have 3 parts, the HTTP part, the host name part www.firstandgeek.com and finally the file path document.html. The first path called HTTP is a standard protocol need to be followed when some web browsers and web servers interacts each other.

The second part known as the host name or the domain name which is actually a conversion of an IP address which identifies your server computer where the website files actually stored. We are converting the IP address to domain name to make it more readable. For example the IP address of firstandgeek.com is 103.21.59.20 and if every website is like this, how many of them can be remembered?

Step 3:- So while giving a URL to your browser, it get converted to corresponding IP and locates the computer server where the files actually exists and bring them back to the client computer within the browser.

The reason behind the 504 gateway timeout errors in a website

The probability for a website to show the 504 error for a long period is very less.We will discuss more about this in below section. The person behind each and every website may different so the way in which they customize the error 504 may also change. It is the webmaster who can decide how a website should look like once an error 504 encountered. So you may have seen different kind of 504 errors. For example below are some customized form of this error.

• 504 gateway timeout
• Gateway Timeout
• HTTP Error 504
• HTTP Error 504 – Gateway Timeout
• HTTP 504
• 504 error
• 504 server error
• gateway timeout error 504

Anyway these errors are same. All these messages get listed on a browser window once such situation get encountered.
The probable reason for this 504 error is the issue with the servers. The servers are now not capable for serving the client request. For some website, there my have multiple servers in different location. Multiple servers are using for serving the contents to the client in a quick manner and for load balancing. If one server need to access the other one for resources, there may have time delay and made impact on the front end if the request at a time is very high.
Some company’s may have hosted their website with cheap servers which are not compatible with handling many requests at a time. For example, in India, most of the university websites get “504 gateway timeout” at the time of result declaration and at the time of allotments. This is because of the cheap servers with which the website are hosted.
If you are planning to purchase any servers for hosting, most of the company’s offer 99% up time. Just convert this % to time. That means in 100 minutes, your server will not available for 1 minute. In a day, there are 24*60=1440 minutes. Then your servers can be down for approximately 14 minutes. This all makes the 504 error.

What to do if you are getting Error 504?

#1 For Webmasters
If you are a webmaster, then you should better contact your hosting company for knowing more about this issue. Most webmasters won’t contact their hosting company if they had made a 99% up time contract. This won’t make sense if you are running any potential eCommerce websites or other online business portals. In such case, you should maintain servers with approximately 100% up time servers or multiple servers.
Also make sure that your servers are running fine in all parts of the world. Normally VPN  or proxy tools help you to check this.
#2 For general users
If you are a general user or visitor of that website, then you can follow these tip.

• Wait until the server gets balanced:- In normal case, this tip will work. As I told above, the website get down for only certin period. Check the website again in a couple of minute. You can now bypass this error 504. In three forth of situation, this is going to get worked.
• Use Wayback machine to get the cached copy of website:- If you want to view the destination website for accessing images and text, this will going to work. The online tool called way back machine help you to get the previous model of the desired website. Here is how google.com look likes in 2000. This also helps you to get the contact information of the desired website.

• Use the Social medias for contacting the webmaster:- Almost all websites may have their own social signals. Maybe Facebook, twitter, Google plus or anything like that. You can find out these social pages and contact the webmaster regarding the issue or regarding the details you want.
• Check whether it is your network problem:- This point also have a chance. Your ISP may be the reason for this kind of bad gateway error messages. So try the destination website from other ISP or after restarting your mobile, modem, PC etc.
• Check for malware presence in your browser:- This also have a slight chance. If your browser is under the control of potential malware and viruses, you may face difficulty in browsing websites. So check the destination website through other options to figure out this possibility.

Hope this small tutorial help you to get the basic idea about all 504 errors. We are waiting for your fine reply in this issue. We appreciate your findings, solutions, anything related to this 504 gateway timeout errors. So what are you waiting for? The comment box is just below.