"Down for Maintenance" HTTP Code

what should i use?

[webdevsf]

When I'm doing updates to my site, sometimes I am required to take it down for a period of time. Are there any HTTP codes I can use to signal to crawlers to "come back later" and ignore my "maintenance" sign (which is mostly for users)?

[oilman]

that's a tough one for sure. I've never heard of any reliable way to tell a spider to come back later. I would never - ever - take a site offline for maintenance. If it really came down to it I would set up a second hosting account, create a mirror, do the maintenace there and then overwrite the old site again. Always have a feast laid out for the spiders - they dont' get fed and you can have a hard time coaxing them back.

[webdevsf]

Hm, i was thinking about using a 502 server temporarily overloaded.

My site is db driven, and keeping a db driven site up with no downtime for maintenance is not easy, especially if there are significant changes to the schema or stored procedures that will "break" the site.

[jatar_k]

What about 302 moved temporarily? just a thought.

[oilman]

yeah - if there are significant changes while you are doing the maintenance that would pose significant problems. I would vote for the 502 I think.

[graywolf]

When I take my site down for maintenace I put up page that says " blah, blah blah this site is temporarily down for maintenance please check back in 15 minutes." I was checking something from home and too my shock I saw that page was cached on Google! When I checked the next morning at work it was back to normal.

[lorax]

Normally if I'm doing a major overhaul I keep the old site in place and build the new one right alongside it. I will use a subdir called "new" or some such. And if I'm rebuilding the db I'll make a copy of the original and rename it - unless the new version is a drastic departure in which case I start fresh.