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.
Note: The link Edit error page is displayed only if your hosting plan
provides the option to customize web server error documents (the
Custom error documents is On in the domain settings in
Websites & Domains > domain name > Hosting Settings).
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.
Note: In Plesk versions earlier than 11.5, this status was called
Suspended.
Active sites
To bring the website back online, use Websites & Domains > domain
name > the Activate link. The website will start working as usual.