Planned maintenance outage

[beermikester]

We have been informed by our ISP that they will be performing mainenance on our server, and our web site will be down for a period of time. The times the server may be out are:

1) Saturday 3/30/13 10pm - Sunday 3/31/13 10am EDT
2) Saturday 4/6/13 10pm - Sunday 4/7/13 10am EDT

[wnordmann]

Two 12 hour outages, that's pretty substantial. I wonder what they are doing?

[beermikester]

Below is the full text of their message:


3essentials maintenance notification for your Shared Hosting Server WEB28

This notification is to inform you of an SCHEDULED MAINTENANCE on 3Essentials hosting infrastructure which will impact you.

You are receiving this notification because you are a 3Essentials hosting customer with at least one domain hosted on a server for which we have scheduled maintenance. You may receive multiple copies if you have multiple domains or hosting plans on this server.

SERVER: Web28.3essentials.com

ESTIMATED MAINTENANCE WINDOWS:
1) Saturday 3/30/13 10pm - Sunday 3/31/13 10am EDT
2) Saturday 4/6/13 10pm - Sunday 4/7/13 10am EDT

Both windows may be considerably shorter if there are no unforeseen challenges with these activities.

DESCRIPTION: These maintenances include upgrades to WEB28's hardware and disk subsystems to improve performance and stability.

IMPACT ASSESSMENT:
- all services on web28 (web, database, mail, panel, mail) will be brought offline for some to all of the maintenance window.
- any inbound mail will be accepted and held at the incoming mailgateways until web28 is brought back online.

During the maintenance window updates will be posted to our SYSTEM STATUS area found inside the MyAccount pages at http://www.3essentials.com/myaccount.asp

[wnordmann]

"disk subsystems"
Storage device upgrade, new Netapp or EMC or such. They can be finicky devices to upgrade.

[tlael]

I got a kick out of, "Both windows may be considerably shorter if there are no unforeseen challenges with these activities."

Usually, it is the inverse that needs to be stated.

Something like, "This may go to hell in a handbasket, so it is possible that you may be down for 24 hours or longer."

[jeffjm]

During the maintenance window updates will be posted to our SYSTEM STATUS area...

A really honest update might read:

In an effort to improve stability, reliability, capacity, and performance, we've gone and effed things up so badly that we don't know when anything will be working again. You're lucky that we were even able to post this message. Service will be restored sometime between four hours from now and next Wednesday.

I've been tempted to send that message out a few times, but I value my job too much

[astx813]

I got a kick out of, "Both windows may be considerably shorter if there are no unforeseen challenges with these activities."

Usually, it is the inverse that needs to be stated.

Something like, "This may go to hell in a handbasket, so it is possible that you may be down for 24 hours or longer."

Managing expectations. Tell your customers you're scheduling a 12 hour outage and they'll have no problem whatsoever with you finishing early. Tell them "it will hopefully only take an hour, but might take more," and a mob will call for your head after 2 hours.

[jeffjm]

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Tell customers 12 hours a couple times, and it only takes two - and you'll get flak because your customers went to the time and trouble of planning for 12 when they could have planned for much shorter downtime.

Or, tell them twelve hours often enough, and they'll start shopping around your competitors seeing if they'll promise shorter outages.

I hate customer comms. It's enough to make me want a beer.

[turkeyjerky214]

I hate customer comms. It's enough to make me want a beer.

I try not to associate beer with the feeling I have after dealing with obnoxious clients.

[JoeHPhil]

How about:

We'll really try to make this as short as possible an outage but sometimes bad things happen to good people. If we do take longer than 2 hours, the length of each phone call asking 'when will we be up?' after the appropriate niceties will be tacked on to the outage window. Also, before you choose to setup a senior level conference call to discuss the strategy of the existing outage please understand that the length of that call plus the time it takes to get each senior manager (individually) up to speed on the issues also removes time from resolving the problem and can therefore be added to the outage window. Lastly, If the outage extends past 8 hours please add the time it took me to explain the obvious information above to the outage window as well the time it takes me to RDWHAHB.