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Please Share the Pain!!!!
 
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Fly-right



Joined: 03 Sep 2006
Posts: 5

PostPosted: Sun Dec 03, 2006 2:37 am    Post subject: Please Share the Pain!!!! Reply with quote

Maintenance is necessary and a good thing that benifits us all; my question is, "can we share the pain"?
I live in Sydney Australia and every time the site goes down for maintenance it is in prime time, Sunday morning/afternoon and that ultimately hurts business. Our business is 24/7 and with many people home on weekends they have the opportunity to surf and acquire information. Our competition is still active and ultimately we are disadvantaged by being off line.

I know the time chosen is to minimize disruption to users but [b]may I remind you it is a global economy and no where is the centre of the universe - not even the USA (don't take it badly...it is true). [/b]

May I suggest we share prime time, down time....it is equitable and will help users outside of the USA view Blogharbor as a truly international facility!
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Fly-right



Joined: 03 Sep 2006
Posts: 5

PostPosted: Sun Dec 03, 2006 4:04 am    Post subject: Please Share the Pain!!!! #2 Reply with quote

In addition to my previous Post may I suggest that Maintenance Notices be shown in GMT or UTC - as EST means nothing to anyone outside your immediate time zone; many countries have EST time zones and as such just confuses potential viewers of our sites!!!!

Although I have been associsted with Blogharbor for some months now, I am not even sure of the location of your EST.

Thank you in anticipation....
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john
Site Admin


Joined: 16 Mar 2004
Posts: 3434

PostPosted: Sun Dec 03, 2006 9:06 am    Post subject: Re: Please Share the Pain!!!! #2 Reply with quote

Maintenance is necessary and a good thing that benifits us all; my question is, "can we share the pain"?

Point taken. My best response to this would be to point you to my reply to a similar query where I wrote:

john wrote:
We do have a significant of users in Europe, and a growing number in Asia, in addition to the North American users. I myself lived for a very long time near your part of the globe and still spend a great deal of time outside of the US, so I am quite cognizant of the fact that there is life outside this continent. Wink

We are doing our best to schedule maintenance when it would inconvenience the least number of users AND when it will allow us to have the maximum number of staff on hand for the longest duration of time through the maintenance window.

That's the tricky part... It's easy to schedule a maintenance, but hard to manage one. What if something goes wrong? Are the staff on hand to do something if something unexpected occurs? Where is the developer who wrote that code that passed all the quality control tests but now is behaving poorly in the production environment?

If you take a look above at some of the issues we are trying to work on at this time, you will see that we are trying to build out an environment where we can more accurately simulate an upgrade before we perform one. As we improve this process, the need to have staff on hand just in case will decrease and we will be much more free to perform maintenance windows simply by looking at the usage graph and picking out the lowest utilization of the week with less necessity to balance that against a staffing chart...


There really is no good time to have a maintenance, but it is not always possible to "share the pain" as you put it.

In addition to my previous Post may I suggest that Maintenance Notices be shown in GMT or UTC - as EST means nothing to anyone outside your immediate time zone; many countries have EST time zones and as such just confuses potential viewers of our sites!!!!

That's a good point, I'm surprised we overlooked that... We'll try to make sure that UTC times are shown during future maintenance windows.
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des



Joined: 31 Dec 2004
Posts: 152

PostPosted: Fri Dec 08, 2006 1:27 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

That old deja vu all over again!

I related, as they say, to Fly-right's plea - and I well remember your reply to me then John, as reproduced here.

If it's a small consolation John, I work on Queensland time so it's really confusing for me.
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Des Walsh
Gold Coast, Australia
www.thinkinghomebusiness.com
Author, 7 Step Business Blog
http://www.7stepbusinessblog.com
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