Recently we had a customer notice that their site wasn’t really working right at about 11 PM at night. The home page looked fine, and some of the secondary pages came up, but then some secondary pages did not come up properly.
What they had run into was the time frame for the server hosting company to commit software updates to their servers. There are occasional, brief periods when server companies have to interrupt at least somewhat the normal operations of a web site to update the software pieces that make those servers operate. How server companies schedule this is dependent on the server company, the amount of work involved in making the updates, and the growing need for updating that software (read into that, fixing a security issue). There’s very little a web developer can do in these situations sometimes other than know it is going to occur, and if it is going to knowingly impact a client, let the client know.
The web server environment currently is in a higher level of updates period than most of the recent past. Security needs, phase out of software versions, and other reasons lead to this. The server company we use most probably has at least 2 of these events per month at this point in time. Now, we’re talking about a prospect downtime of usually less than 5 minutes, late at night or the very early morning hours, when traffic in our area is traditionally at its very lowest.
But not all our clients’ sites are really local – some of national interest, some have international interest. So timing isn’t necessarily that helpful. Fortunately, they’ve started offering a premium option for Live Kernel Updates that allows them to update a Dedicated or VPS account without requiring a reboot. It isn’t available for shared server accounts. It’s not a necessity for most sites, but international sites may benefit from it.