It would be great if you could turn off the store with a message saying ‘Store offline for maintenance come back soon’ or something similar.
 
Regards john

Yes

yes quite agree, simple but useful feature indeed!

I second this feature request
 
It is especially needed when one has to Upgrade Viart cart.

This has been mentioned before, no news from Viart. I agree it should have this feature. And its easy to do.

Greetings
 
This might be helpful to some of you until "off-line for maintenance" feature is added.
 
1. Changing permissions public_html folder - worked great.
 
2. If you'd like to send visitors to a page explaining why your site is down, instead of just denying them access without an explanation, you can make a .htaccess file that catches all requests and directs them to one page, like so:
  RewriteEngine on
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://example.com/maintenance.html [r=301,nc]
 
If you save that as a file called .htaccess to public_html it will redirect all visitors to http://example.com/maintenance.html, obviously you'd fill in your own address, and you will of course have to set the permissions for public_html back to 755.

Great! That works perfectly... thank you!