take site down

you could go into the dns settings and disable it and just put a temp page up, most hosting providers have a temp page when you first register a domain and buy hosting. check with your hosting provider.

Shut down the webserver?

Pull the network cable?

Replace the index.html with a holding page (although that may not stop people getting to the deeper pages)

Change DNS (also may not stop people getting to the site).

Delete the entire site from the production server (assume you have multiple backups).

It really depends on your specifics.

Alan.

Depends on what you mean by "take site down".

Any of the above actions will accomplish your goal + this might be more brutal than what you're after.

Many times, it's useful to take a site down, so visitors see a maintenance message + site actually still lives so you can work on some problem or roll in some enhancement.

The way I do this is as follows...

1) On the live site DocumentRoot, point this directory to a directory with a single index.html file which says something like this...

http://144.217.34.8

At this point all visitors to site will see a friendly message + DNS remains the same, so things like SSL cert renewal continue to work.

Also, your SEO traction will hold, for a short period of time... best guess, no SEO effect if your actual content returns in a few days.

2) Now in your Apache config, associate a new IP with your site.

At this point, only you will know the new IP + site (domain or host) relationship, so only you will be able to reference site.

3) Now modify your local /etc/hosts, as follows... say your IP is 1.1.1.1 for foo.com add an /etc/hosts record as follows.

1.1.1.1 foo.com www.foo.com

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Now you'll be able to use your site, exactly like a live site... so your SSL will work... Logins will work. The entire site will work... well... this imagines you're site is tooled correctly, with relative links. If your site is poorly tooled (which is most sites), then go one step further.

Run a local DNS caching server, like dnsmasq at machine level or container level (when LXC/LXD/Docker in use). In your local DNS caching server, make an entry which duplicates the /etc/hosts function above. This will effectively hijack any https://foo.com/... style links embedded in your site + route them back to 1.1.1.1 rather than the IP DNS provides external visitors for your site.

Likely best for you to update your question with exactly what you're trying to accomplish by "taking down a site" + many people will have great suggestions for your to explore.