Kentico stuck in offline mode

try hitting the login page directly

• yourdomain.com/CMSPages/Logon.aspx
• if that works try going to the admin interface using yourdomain.com/Admin/CMSAdministration.aspx

Well, the only way would be asking somebody who has access to the DB to change the SiteIsOffline value in the CMS_Site table in the DB directly and set it to false (0). Then, you need to restart the application e.g. by doing a fake change in the web.config file.

A little update why the site was stuck in offline mode.

Basically the offline page was setup as .aspx page. So when the CMS was looking for an actual page that didn’t exist it was throwing a 500, so the hosting company's load balancer puts up a maintenance page automatically, one that didn't look like a kentico offline message page. We than created a manual offline.html file and pointed the offline to that file. That seem to fix the admin ui lock out issue.

We then tried doing some deploys to the site and we were getting some CSS caching issues. The hosting company was having an issue on the secondary prod server webapp, where the cached response was being returned. They just recycled that app pool and it tested ok on both nodes (forced each offline and tested).

So we have some stuff to work out with our hosting company.