Say I want to change some things on my website or DNS propagation is taking place. I need a way of displaying a friendly 503 status message to users who try to visit my site. I am going to create an HTML file called SiteDown.html and save it in the errors directory of my site. Since I don’t have access to the Nginx config file, is there a way I can edit the .htaccess file to have users be redirected to that page when the site is undergoing maintenance?
You could try to set it with an ErrorDocument line in your .htaccess file (as we use both nginx and Apache so you have the benefits of both). However, that only works if your website is generating the 503 error, if the error is caused by a system issue then it’s not possible to show custom error pages.