Computing desk | ||
---|---|---|
< May 13 | << Apr | May | Jun >> | May 15 > |
Welcome to the Wikipedia Computing Reference Desk Archives |
---|
The page you are currently viewing is a transcluded archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages. |
Imagine that a major organisation's website has to be taken down for maintenance for a few days. The developers don't want their organisation's website to return 404 errors, so they put up a page that says "this page is undergoing maintenance; we'll be back soon". How does such a page work? Do the developers route requests for server #1 (which is offline) to server #2 (which gives the outage message), or is there a better way to do it? Context: Ebsco took down a lot of their site for maintenance several days ago, so pages like https://ecm.ebscohost.com are currently saying "we're doing maintenance, check https://status.ebsco.com for updates", and I'm just curious how a server can be both online (so it gives this message) and offline (so it doesn't let me use the site like normal) at the same time.
When I search Google for information, all I'm finding is either "what does this status page mean" pages, for new Internet users who encounter them, or "use our status page generator" pages, for companies that offer such pages as a service. Nothing appears to explain how it works. Nyttend backup (talk) 20:00, 14 May 2021 (UTC)