nginx – deploy-and.run

The Control Panel Ate My Maintenance Page

November 15, 2026November 12, 2026 by halimat

nginx config sketch: an inline return 503 with an HTML page is stored as return 503 with an empty string; the fix maps 502, 503 and 504 to a maintenance page file with status 503.

A 503 maintenance page inlined into an nginx vhost saved without error and served an empty body: the hosting panel that owns the vhost strips HTML on save. The first explanation for it was wrong too. The fix is a page that lives in a file, and a vhost block with no angle brackets in it at all — not even in comments.