Search Engine Friendly Temporary Maintenance Page

Allow sub domains and some folders

[abushahin]

Hello,
Just wondered if its possible to take the site down for maintenance but still allow sub domains and some folders?

Im found something on the www need help amending

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !^123\.456\.789\.000

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/maintenance.html$ [NC]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !\.(jpe?g?|png|gif) [NC]

RewriteRule .* /maintenance.html [R=302,L]

ANy help mush appreciated!

[motorhaven]

Even though Google and other crawlers should recognize the 302 as a temporary relocation I like to avoid sending any page redirection headers.

I send out a "503 Service Unavailable" code instead, which indicates the server is down or undergoing maintenance. Instead of redirecting it to a HTML page I recommend you yend it to a php script which gives the maintenance message:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !^123\.456\.789\.000
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/maintenance.php$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !\.(jpe?g?|png|gif) [NC]
RewriteRule .* /maintenance.php [L]

Then the maintenance.php script:

<?
header('HTTP/1.1 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable');
header('Retry-After: 600'); // Retry after 10 minutes
echo 'Your maintenance message here.";
?>

[g1smd]

The 503 status is the correct one to use.

Downtime of only a few hours is no worry whatsoever.
Google will be back in there in short order soon after the stated expiry time.

[abushahin]

Thanks for the correct error code. Is there anyway to allow some folders though using htaccess whilst redirecting all root visiters?

[g1smd]

Be clear, this is NOT a redirect. Redirects return a 30x status code.

This is a method of returning an alternative status code and a human-readable message for some vistors.

Use a series of RewriteCond conditions to select which vistors and/or which user agents see the message and which do not and/or which paths and files are accessible and which are not.

[motorhaven]

Noticed a mistake in my code. The echo should end with a single ' quote, not a double " quote.