2

Is there a way to display a website offline/maintenance message to users who try and visit a website where the physical server is offline.

The scenario: We have multiple client websites running at their site on their server. Sometimes they need to restart their physical server.

Would it be possible for our server here at the office to display the offline/maintenance message to users who try to visit their website if it's unreachable?

All servers will be running Windows Server 2012, Ruby on Rails and MySQL.

Edit: Preferably would be looking for an automatic solution for unplanned downtime.

Nathan C
  • 15,059
  • 4
  • 43
  • 62
Taylor Williams
  • 21
  • 2
  • How much are you willing to spend ? – user9517 Feb 04 '14 at 09:35
  • @Iain I can see my company being reluctant to spend money on this, however, I could push something out of them maybe if it's between £0-£350 one off, or a small monthly fee? – Taylor Williams Feb 04 '14 at 09:41
  • You need to implement 'something' upstream of the customer server that will detect it has gone away and then redirect traffic to your site. This will likely cost more than your available budget in time alone. – user9517 Feb 04 '14 at 09:45

1 Answers1

1

If it is a planned outage, pointing the DNS record to the server serving the outage page should suffice (and decreasing TTL beforehand).

Reacting to an unplanned outage might be possible with a loadbalancer forwarding requests to the outage page server if all other servers in rotation for a site are unreachable. This is more costly and possibly more errorprone though.

fuero
  • 9,591
  • 1
  • 35
  • 40