Announcing New Scheduled Service Windows
One of the best things about Woopra is that we employ a very rapid develop, test and deploy process. Most of our projects are completed in a number of weeks, and small changes are constantly rolled into our stats servers in order to facilitate upgrades and bug fixes. However, the drawback to making constant updates is that there is usually a period of a few moments when the server is taken offline and then restarted.
These restarts normally take about five minutes, during which time no stats are gathered and your Woopra application would disconnect. During our Beta period, these events would often take place with little or no notice, however we’re making a few changes now that we have emerged from beta in order to follow a more structured approach towards maintenance.
Beginning immediately, we will have two scheduled maintenance windows per week during which we may make updates to the core services. These windows will be on Wednesdays and Sundays from 00:00-01:00 PST (GMT-8). So, most of the US will be asleep, and this will be just before the start of the business day in western Europe. We should be catching our friends in Asia and Australia during the end of the work day.
These global windows are difficult to schedule, so we apologize for any inconvenience that might occur as the result of a brief outage, but this will enable us to keep continually updating the service and bringing you new features and improved performance.
Thanks for the heads up John.
As website owners, I’m sure we all appreciate the need for reboots to servers. My company is having one in about an hour and a half – for example, as we upgrade the kernel and other security on Linux! Great minds think alike….
The timing seems sensible. It’s probable that you’ll catch a fair amount of websites just building up traffic in Europe…more in the CET area than the UK time zone. But this doesn’t apply on Sundays, and as a webmaster I’d find it difficult to complain about a five minute POSSIBLE downtime period each week. Especially if I had been given advance notice of it!
Regards
Dilip
No worries! I’m sure that happens with google all the time, you just don’t hear about it and there’s no way you could know!
But what about other people in other timezones? Like the Middle East for example :)
We’re aware of the problems for international users, but this maintenance time is usually very short, rarely noticed by most. As we grow, we may change the schedules to accommodate a variety of time zones, but we just needed to set one time that would not interfere with the majority of our current user base. Thanks.