The website status defines whether a website is available over the Internet and what hosting services are provided for it. The hosting provider may need to change the status of a site if the client does not pay for the services. Site owners can change the status of their sites if they want the sites to be temporarily unavailable.

Plesk supports three website statuses: Suspended, Disabled, and Active.

Suspended Sites

If you want to shut down a site for maintenance and let your visitors know that it is temporarily unavailable, you can suspend the website so that it will not open in browsers (Websites & Domains > domain name > the Suspend link). Visitors will be redirected with the search engine friendly 503 HTTP code (Service Unavailable) to the “503 Service Unavailable” error page. The site’s search engine rankings will not be affected, and the hosting services such as mail will still be available and manageable by means of Plesk.

You can customize the error page using the link Edit error page in Customer Panel > Websites & Domains > domain name.

Disabled Sites

If you stop maintaining a website, you can disable it using Websites & Domains > domain name > the Disable link. Visitors will see the web server’s default page set by the hosting provider, and the site’s search engine rankings will drop.

Disabled websites stop being hosted on the server: They are excluded from the web server configuration. However, the physical directories and files of disabled sites can be accessed by FTP clients and File Manager. The hosting services such as mail will be unavailable.

Active sites

To bring the website back online, use Websites & Domains > domain name > the Activate link. The website will start working as usual.