This site is down for maintenance

[luckykaa]

Whhy do some websites need to spend several days down for "maintenance"?  What are they doing?  Do the adminitrators need to take out the website and put it on a ramp while they inspect it for wear?  Surely all they need to do is make all the updates offline, and then spend a few minutes uploading the changes. 

Clerarly there's more to it than that, but what are the maintainers doing?

Comments

[raygungothic.livejournal.com]

• The server crashed, and they can't find the backup tapes because the guy who changes them is on holiday
• The server crashed, and it turns out that the people paid to maintain the server and do backups couldn't be bothered, so all the content has to be retyped
• They've updated their security and discovered that the new security breaks their code
• The design is co-ordinated by one company, implemented by another and relies on a database created by a third; two of the firms have very undiplomatic staff and one keeps changing things arbitrarily without telling the others
• The owners and the developers are arguing about what the developers are contractually obligated to do for the money they've already been paid, and this takes time
• The developers arbitrarily decided to cut corners and deviate from the specification, and this has finally caused problems
• A problem occurred, but no-one was prepared to admit responsibility so it just languished
• ...too many more to mention

(and these are just one company site...)

Fantastic!

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

Or not as the case may be ...

... I was going to say one or two of those, but your list is *much* better!

Re: Fantastic!

[raygungothic.livejournal.com]

Thank you. :-)

They're actually reasons my firm's site has yet to go public, rather than reasons to call it down for maintenance, but other than these (and the "many others") it's been on a test server and 90% ready to go for a long time now. Any of those problems could have happened after launch as well. *shudders at the thought*

It was meant to be up eight months before I got here. I've worked here for one year now. It goes public... tomorrow? Wish us luck, we'll need it.

[luckykaa.livejournal.com]

This isn't a company site though.

It's just The waiters blog (http://www.waiterrant.net/) which is a small scale personal blog site. It's not like there's going to be heaps of beaurocracy behind it.

[raygungothic.livejournal.com]

Then why is it surprising that it should go down for a few days while they look for the time to work out how to fix something? It's only when there are paid professionals involved that downtime becomes inexcusable...

[luckykaa.livejournal.com]

Just seems odd... It's not the sort of thing that suddenly goes wrong, and the choice of date makes it sound like it's a planned outage.

It wasn't meant as a criticism. It's just something that seems a little odd.