Restricting your Magento instance to your IP address exclusively

Other visitors, including search spiders, will get the HTTP 503 Service Unavailable error.
Create a file 503.php in your Magento installation root:

1. <?php
2. header('HTTP/1.1 503 Service Unavailable');
3. header('Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8');
4. echo "503 Service Unavailable";

In .htaccess or in Apache server configuration, add the following rewrite rule:



Where 127.0.0.1 (note the backslashes before dots) should be replaced with your IP-address.
Once you save this .htaccess file or reload Apache configuration, your site will be down until you restore the initial state.