Matthew Gates http://notetoservices.com 2m 618 #maintainance
The views of this article are the perspective of the author and may not be reflective of Confessions of the Professions.
Website Open For Business
The Internet is a 24/7 open book, open store, open everything. The Internet never shuts down and keeps going. Occasionally, you may find yourself without Internet, but it is not because the Internet itself down, it is usually because you did not pay the Internet bill or there was an issue with the Internet company itself, or a power line that delivers the Internet to your home may have been knocked out and therefore, you are without Internet.
During this critical time, you may find yourself with nothing better to do than talk to your family, your friends, play with your cat, or do something that is offline. Fortunately for you, you probably just tether your mobile phone and use the Internet from your iPhone or Android. During this time, you continue your regular life of browsing the Internet for whatever you do with your time while on the Internet, hopefully browsing Confessions of the Professions.
If you run a website, a business, or a blog online, the chances are that you treat it with care, and you do all in your power to ensure that your website is fast and is stored on a good web host. You ensure that you provide good information on your website or products on your website. Occasionally, however, you may find that your website requires some updates, whether to the server itself, or upgrades that may need to be done for general maintenance of this website.
Once upon a time, maintenance of websites were done by a webmaster, and many business websites, including Ebay or Amazon, would shut down their websites for a few hours, often around midnight Eastern Standard Time, usually on early Sundays. They would come back up by morning and everything would go back to normal.
Nowadays, however, big company websites like Ebay and Amazon have hundreds of servers, so when one needs maintenance, they never have to go down, as the information is stored across several different servers. These companies are worldwide companies and there is never a “midnight” or a “weekend.” These companies are businesses that operate 24/7 and never shut down. If they ever do shut down, they lose money, and money is not something any company wants to lose.
Most websites, nowadays, including those that run on WordPress, require some updating, but those updates take just a few minutes, and during this time, the site may be down, but a few minutes is all that is acceptable. A few minutes may even cost visitors, which is why any updates should be done at a reasonable time. If you know your visitors are mostly from the United States, you will probably want to update at peak sleep times, when no one is up, for example, early in the morning EST, where you know CST and PST are still asleep.
Make sure your website is up 99.9% of the time. If you must do updates, maintenance, or even beta testing, than do it at a reasonable time when you know you have the least visitors to the website. If you are a very popular website, you will want to make sure that you do things very quickly, as you only have a few-minute time frame to get any work done to your website.
Please note that most of the time, people will forgive your website for being under maintenance and going down from time to time, but it is important to make sure your web host and server are up nearly all the time. If you find you are having common issues with your host and your website is down every few days, than you may want to consider switching to a new host.
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