If my site gets attacked, it could serve up a lot of 403-Forbidden error pages, which would use a lot of resources, slowing my site or even bringing it down. For 404-Not Found errors, I want to serve a friendly helpful page that fits in with the look and feel of my site. Legitimate visitors should rarely if ever encounter a 403-Forbidden error though, so I prefer to politely limit resource use to the extent practical. My solution is a custom 403 text string, using the following line at the beginning of my .htaccess file:
ErrorDocument 403 "403: Sorry, not permitted."
