Last week, I sent out an email to newsletter subscribers about creating emergency pages. The whole idea behind an emergency page is when a part of your site goes down, you can quickly redirect people to a page to try to salvage your traffic.

There was some confusion about this. After all, if your site is down, it’s down. How can you redirect people or even display any page? So I’m going to straighten things out.

First, I said when part of your site goes down, referring to dynamically generated pages like blogs, forums, directories or any content management system. Compared to a few short years ago, more and more sites are being powered by some kind of script to help manage content. All these rely on the database to serve up your content. If your database goes down, that part of your site goes down.

The database and web server usually run independent of each other. In other words, even though the database is down, that does not automatically mean your web server is down. This means, you can still serve static HTML pages – you know like the ones you create with good old fashioned hand coding or FrontPage.

It is in such situations, an emergency page might be useful.