Question

I have a static web page that I need to turn off, I don’t want to delete the file though because there is a good chance I will need to turn it back on in the future. How can I do this?

Thanks!

Answer 1

If the page you are wanting to temporarily ‘hide’ is a php page, you could do something like this at the top of that php file you want to ‘hide’.

<?php 
header('Location: http://www.example.com/not_available.html');
die();
?> 

Just replace the url after Location: to a placeholder page of your choosing.

There are other HTTP header tricks you could do, like returning a 404, 503, etc.

http://phpweby.com/tutorials/php/35

You could also use the .htaccess trick suggested by @andrew-g-johnson, using the .htaccess file shouldn’t have much of an impact performance wise, especially compared to doing it inside PHP.