"A lot of things can go wrong when requesting information over HTTP from a remote web server: requests timeout, servers fail, government operatives cut undersea cables. You get the picture."

Good reminder of how to identify and handle HTTP problems when writing an HTTP Client.

Summary:

• Account for DNS lookup failures
• Set a connection and read timeout
• Be sure to handle HTTP errors
• Check that the response has the content type you expect
• Limit the maximum response size
• Ensure that private URLs are not requestable
• Always. Be. SSLing.