How to show maintenance page during deployment?

Question

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

Oshaughnessy

Possible duplicate of Redirect site visitors during maintenance – Ratha

Answer 1

Try putting App_Offline.htm to the root directory.

Shurwood

@deviant 12 second was probably the amount of time it took you to get the link. upvote for that. thanks – Oshaughnessy

@AntonGogolev What about a solution for MVC? Unfortunately it did not worked for MVC :( – Kilometer

@Clint Eastwood For me works for MVC without any problems – Re

@Re Did you try in a IIS Server? Does it working during a publish process continues? – Kilometer

How do I do it only for everyone but myself (identified by cookie, ip address or some other means)? Obviously I need to test the site after updating it. – Certified

@Certified - it's quite complicated but you could try this ... thereformedprogrammer.net/… – Candiscandle

@AntonGogolev - How does this address the 2nd point of the OP? Couldn't it could have devastating SEO effects for a well-ranking site? – Candiscandle

@Candiscandle A well-ranking site should be properly load-balanced and no deployment should take the entire site offline. – Shurwood

@AntonGogolev a well-ranking site need not necessarily be a big money-earner. Small businesses or community groups would hardly to be able to afford the specialised expertise required to set up and maintain a load-balanced system. Also, very few Windows web hosts seem to offer load balancing so you'd probably need to be running your own server farm to be able to do this. – Candiscandle

@AntonGogolev - I forgot to add a prefix to that to say that "Yes, load-balancing would be ideal. But..." By the time I thought of it 7 minutes had passed so I was unable to edit my comment. – Candiscandle

I have an MVC app on Azure IIS and have realized app_offline.htm for MVC might not be the best option. I quickly used app_offline.htm but stylesheets, images, and script files that are referenced could break. For example, IE Edge forces the slash (/) after the end of the domain whereas google chrome does not include the slash. My references broke. For MVC, I think routes need to take charge and not the app_offline.htm – Nebulize

Answer 2

copy an app_offline.htm file to the webroot

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

Caughey

Any solution for MVC please? Unfortunately it did not worked for MVC :( – Kilometer

@ChadGrant - How does this address the 2nd point of the OP? Couldn't it could have devastating SEO effects for a well-ranking site? – Candiscandle

@Candiscandle From what I gather, the 503 response returned by App_Offline.htm is well-understood by web-crawlers, and shouldn't impact SEO terribly much. – Ratha