Maintenance mode

Maintenance mode takes one zone offline on purpose. While it is on, every location answers requests for that zone with a maintenance page instead of asking your origin (a certificate challenge is the one exception, below), and switching it off brings the site straight back.

It is a switch on the zone, not on your server, so it takes effect whether or not your origin is running, and every location picks the change up within about five seconds. The switch is Show a maintenance page under Maintenance Mode on the zone page, which shows a banner while it is on and marks the zone In maintenance in the zone list. From the API it is one field on the zone:

curl -X POST https://api.cachegenie.com/v1/cdn/AB12CD34E \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"MAINTENANCE": 1}'

Send 0 to switch it off again. See Zones in the API reference.

What your visitors see#

A page on your own hostname, with your certificate, that names the hostname they asked for, says the site has been taken offline by its owner while changes are made, and tells them nothing is wrong with their connection. It carries no links away from your domain. Every method gets it, POST included, and a request that did not ask for a web page, such as a stylesheet, an API call or a video segment, gets one line of plain text instead.

Search engines#

The page is served with the status 503 Service Unavailable and a Retry-After header, which search engines treat as a temporary pause: they come back later and keep your pages indexed in the meantime. A maintenance page built as an ordinary 200 OK does the opposite, since a site that answers every URL with the same page is one whose pages get dropped from the index. The page is never cached, by us or by anything between us and your visitor, so once you switch it off the next request is your real site.

What still works while it is on#

• Certificate renewals on your own origin: requests under /.well-known/acme-challenge/ are passed to your origin as usual, so certbot and anything like it keeps renewing. Without that exemption a long maintenance window would break a renewal and you would find out sixty days later.
• Your Let's Encrypt certificates with us: issued and renewed by us as normal, unaffected.
• Your other zones: this is per zone. A zone in maintenance does not affect any other zone on your account.

Statistics, billing and the other gates#

Nothing served while a zone is paused is recorded or billed: the statistics show those hours as no traffic, and the page is ours rather than your content. There is no bypass for your own address; if you need staff to see the real site while the public does not, do that at your origin.

• Requests that would normally be refused for another reason, a blocked POST or a blocked root path, get the maintenance page too. A paused site answers one thing to everybody.
• Force SSL still answers an HTTP request with its redirect to HTTPS first; the page is then served over HTTPS.
• On a zone with token authentication on, an unsigned link is still refused with 403 rather than shown the maintenance page. The signature is checked first, deliberately, so an unsigned request learns nothing about the zone.
• A visitor your blocking rules refuse is refused first, too, and never sees the maintenance page.