views:

330

answers:

2

I want to plan a schedule maintenance down time on one of my production asp.net website hosted on IIS windows server 2003.

I think this is the preferred behavior:

  1. All request to http://www.x.com including www.x.com/asb/asd/ will be redirected to a notification page (site is currently down. come back later)
  2. The maintenance will take around an hour. how do I ensure for having this redirection to maintenance page to have the least impact to SEO/google ranking
  3. Preferrably I want to be able to quietly test the production site before it goes back 'live'
  4. Preferrably I dont want to rely on pointing DNS elsewhere.
  5. To make it simple please pretend that I don't have any other hardware in front of the web servers (i.e load balancer, firewall etc)

An idea would be:

  1. to create another app on the same web server
  2. create httpmodule or httphandler to handle any url request and 302 redirect them to the maintenance page

Thanks

+6  A: 

Try putting App_Offline.htm to the root directory.

Anton Gogolev
doh! 12 seconds!
Chad Grant
that's a record time!
ronaldwidha
@deviant 12 second was probably the amount of time it took you to get the link. upvote for that. thanks
ronaldwidha
+1  A: 

copy an app_offline.htm file to the webroot

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2005/10/06/426755.aspx

Chad Grant