Always have a holding page ready
You never know what is going to happen to your site. Servers are temperamental beasts. Here one minute, gone the next in the blink of an eye.
Might be a power outage, virus, an overly enthusiastic developer. There are loads of reasons why your site might suddenly vanish.
You need to make sure you always have a holding page ready for such eventualities. Make sure this page is on a different server because if your server goes down it’ll take the holding page down too.
If your site goes down, forward your domain temporarily to the holding page located on the different server. Forwarding is quicker to implement.
What goes on your holding page? The basic amount of information. Your name, contact information and a brief explanation of why they are seeing this page. Something along the lines of, “We are currently updating our site and hope to be back before the end of the day.”
Of course, set realistic timeframes before you commit to anything. Talk to your hosts first and get a ballpark time frame from them.
And, it goes without saying to NOT use the digging man and “Under construction” emblem