Peak and Non-Peak Hosting Hours

They have: 8 posts

Joined: Jul 2006

We are going to split our uptime metric into a Uptime During Peak and Uptime During Offpeak to avoid penalizing hosts that have scheduled maintenance during offpeak hours. I'd appreciate some feedback on the hours of the day that each of you would consider "peak". For example, you could say that from 9:00a-6:00p CST is peak and every other hour is less critical. Or, you could say that hosts should only do maintenance from 1:00a-4:00a CST and everything else should be considered peak. Opinions?

Rick Ralston
http://www.realmetrics.com - Metrics You Can Count On

realmetrics.com -- Metrics you can count on

He has: 1,758 posts

Joined: Jul 2002

Not all business work 9-5 so I wouldn't use that.

Personally I think something like 8am - 10pm would be more relevant for hosting as those are more like peak internet usage hours (well.. according to the stats on most of my websites anyway...)

Andy

They have: 8 posts

Joined: Jul 2006

Thanks Andyk,

What do you think about weekends versus weekdays? Should weekends be off-peak hours, or should they be treated just like weekdays?

He has: 1,758 posts

Joined: Jul 2002

Weekends are definitely as important as weekdays when it comes to web traffic. I do generally see a little dip in traffic at the weekend but that's likely because some people don't have net access at home and only access the net from the office.

Andy

Busy's picture

He has: 6,151 posts

Joined: May 2001

Also depends on what part of the world your hosts are in. me for example am up to 18 hours ahead of USA and about 12 from UK.
All my hosts have been US based and they do backups etc in their off peak, which is my peak time, has it's draw backs on load time etc

He has: 1,758 posts

Joined: Jul 2002

Good point... If you take into account the fact that people use the internet 24/7 all over the world, there's probably no such thing as general peak/off-peak times except for those specific to each individual website.

Andy

They have: 8 posts

Joined: Jul 2006

We're looking for a way to differentiate between hosts that actually schedule maintenance downtime, and those that just have downtime. Any ideas on how we could do that other than having two separate metrics?

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