How to pause a website?

[Marc van Leeuwen]

What is the best way to pause a website? I found some solutions such as putting this "The website is under maintenance" on index or temporarily suspend current hosting plan for that website. Which one is better? do you have another solutions how to pause a website without affecting traffic and rankings?

 

[Rob Whisonant]

If you take down the site, it's going to lose it rankings.

 

[CNI-Andrew.Oliver]

Instead of taking down the entire site, it may be a better choice to disable the ability to login/purchase etc. depending on the type of site you're running. Essentially whatever the reason for "pausing" the website would be, disable that functionality temporarily