We inform about the repair work on the server

Habr's update, which took place yesterday evening, prompted to write a short note. During the technical works, Habr hangs out a one-page stub, the text on which says about ongoing work. The cap is sent to all requested addresses. No redirect: at what address of the article do not go - everywhere the same text about the repair. In this case, the server response is accompanied by the status “HTTP / 1.1 200 OK”. So does most of the sites I know. And if a person, by and large, doesn’t care, the search engine, which indexes the site at this moment, sees that the content with the article has been updated - you need to update the index.

These are all modal windows that programmers have come up with:
[some garbage happened] - [OK] - Yes, this is not a fig!
@mad_escape

The solution was invented before us and has long been standardized - this is the answer with code 503 , which means that the server is temporarily unavailable. If you know what time it will take to work, then this is also correct to report using the heading Retry-After .

Thus, from the point of view of http, customers should be informed about idle time as follows:
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HTTP/1.1 503 Service Unavailable
Retry-After: 3600

The search engine when visiting the site will understand that it is better not to disturb it yet, and you can go in an hour.