One of the best things about the web is that it’s global, but this can also be a great challenge for webmasters. When you want to do maintenance on your website, you have to keep in mind that it’s always daytime somewhere. As the saying goes, the web never sleeps.
Let’s take an example. 2 a.m. seems to be a pretty common time to initiate a service window where servers and other services are restarted or worked on. Assuming this is done at 2 a.m. in California, USA, what time is it elsewhere in the world?
- 5 a.m. on the US East Coast.
- 10 a.m. in Europe, for example UK.
- 6 p.m. in China and Australia.
As you can see, it may be in the middle of the night for you if you’re a California-based company, but the day is well under way in other parts of the world. Even just counting USA and Europe will leave you without dead time. There is no “in the middle of the night” on the web.
If your website targets for example English-speaking countries, you at least have USA, UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand to think about. There are also numerous countries with English as a second language.
Make sure you can perform your upgrades and your maintenance as seamlessly as possible. Just shutting down the entire service really isn’t an alternative anymore.
If you absolutely have to shut down your entire service for a while, examine the visitor logs on your web servers and try to find a window where as few people as possible will be affected.
