Take ASP.NET application to offline

Hi All,

Here is a simple way to bring asp.net application down.

Just create a htm file named "app_offline.htm" and place it in your root directory. All request to your website will redirect to that app_offline.htm page automatically. If you keep some text like "Site under maintenance" or if you have some nice information to say the customer that the site is in under construction / maintenance it can be easily conveyed. Once your maintenance work completed, you can just remove that file.

It is not actually a redirect but, ASP.NET essentially shuts down the site, unloads it from the server, and stops processing any requests to your site. Once you delete the app_offline.htm file then everything will work fine and your ASP.NET site will load up and start serving requests.

However, you have to keep in mind one thing that you should have enough content in that file (more than 512 bytes) or IE will consider it as 404 then you will see 404 error message.