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When a Website Has to Go Offline: Our Approach to a Fallback Site

What happens when a client's website has to be shut down for security reasons?

A website that runs perfectly, yet nobody can reach it. Sounds like a riddle, but that's exactly what happened in October 2026. A critical security vulnerability in PHP led numerous hosting providers to take their systems offline as a precaution. Some of our clients were affected as well: their websites were unavailable for a while, even though neither the applications nor the servers themselves had failed.

Situations like this can't always be prevented. And we expect to see them more often in the future.

So we came up with a way to keep at least a pared-down version of the website online when that happens.

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A second, independent website

We've deliberately kept our approach simple. Within the existing TYPO3 installation, we set up a separate page tree where clients can maintain a stripped-down version of their website. That might be a single page or multiple pages containing key information and contact details.

We regularly export this content as a static website and host it on independent infrastructure with a different provider, such as Amazon S3 or another static hosting service.

The result is a version of the website without search or forms. It needs neither PHP nor a database, and it keeps working even when the main hosting infrastructure is down.

Automatic failover via the CDN

Under normal circumstances, visitors never notice this second website. They simply get the regular site, as usual.

The content delivery network (CDN) in front of the site monitors the availability of the main infrastructure. If the main infrastructure becomes unavailable, traffic is automatically switched over to the static emergency site.

Visitors stay on the same domain and can still access the information that's been prepared for them.

We also want temporary emergency operation to have as little impact as possible on how search engines index the regular website. That's why the switchover uses the appropriate HTTP status codes.

Not a full copy, and that's intentional

The goal isn't to run a fully redundant copy of the entire website. That would be far more complex technically, and for many of our clients it simply isn't necessary.

The point is to stay reachable during an outage and keep important information available. Features like online shops, forms or customer portals are intentionally left out in emergency mode. This keeps the emergency site lean and independent of the underlying infrastructure.

Our emergency website should not be confused with a dark site designed for corporate crisis communication. An accident, a safety incident at a production facility or any other corporate crisis brings additional requirements for content, approvals and communication processes. We plan solutions like that individually, together with each client.

An extra safety net for our clients

We've developed this approach as a standard solution for the TYPO3 websites we look after. Content is still managed in TYPO3, while delivery runs independently of the main infrastructure.

So even if the main infrastructure goes down completely, the most important information stays available.

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