I'm searching for a method to take a website offline with a message. I know about app_offline.htm, but I would like to do it programmatically.
Taking it offline is easy. I can generate app-offline.htm on root, but when I want web site to be back online it is not possible programmatically, because all services are down including images.
My project uses MVC (C#). For now I'm storing the site status in an SQL server database in a bit field.