How to put magento in maintenance

Question

Is it possible to put a magento site under an maintenance flag so that visitors will get a message that the site is under construction? I can\'t find this setting in the admin a

Answer 1

The following would work with an apache installation (need to check with others).

You could create your own custom site under maintenance html page say index.html and place it in the root directory of your installation.

Open the .htaccess folder and rename the default page from index.php to index.html. Restart Apache. Once you are done rename the default page back to index.php.

It should work.