Symphony.

Hi!

An urgent sudden situation welcomed me when I got home from a 3 day camping in the country. My host screwed up without any prior notification (no e-mail, whatsoever), and managed to completely eradicate libxslt from their server rendering my Symphony CMS installation completely useless.

So I am now writing an angry letter, but meanwhile I would like to set up some small notification and a redirect link for visitors. The redirect link is supposed to point to my Symphony site, should they fix up their junk. The problem is that both my small simple HTML notification and the Symphony site is supposed to sit the same place.

How would you fix this? Well, I have no much hopes in any fast action on their part, and neither have any alternative host handy for a quick fix.

(I might find this out, I am still in the state of shock facing this situation urgently needing some solution I can't conceive right now)

EDIT: This is ridiculous. The problem solved itself. I had the guts to check the logs, apparently the situation only stood for a "brief" time, at least someone could access my site normally 2 hours before I came right into the incident. I experienced it for about 20 minutes, with phpinfo() reporting many parts of the service missing compared to it's normal state.

What you've described sounds like a job for a cookie.

I'd personally just create a new page on the root, something like 'maintenance.html', and set a forced redirect (temporary) to the page in your htaccess, so any access to that domain/directory forwards to the maintenance page - and then remove that rule once the host as sorted things out.

Is your thinking that you'd like the user to be able to keep 'trying' to access the site, but give the message at the same time?

Seems like the problem solved itself, I edited my post meanwhile.

My problem with any semi-permanent solution would have been that I can only maintain my site once a day because of job and such, maybe twice if I wake up earlier in the morning for the purpose of checking and fixing stuff - so if the host had fixed it, say, nine am, I would only have been able to follow it with removing the notification five pm. OK, it is not that critical, just ridiculously annoying (I pay for that thing, they should at least tell me if they are going to play around with it).

Thanks for the suggestion, though! :)

No problem, glad the site's back up and running!