you're right, "avoiding your customers" is not a scalable long-term solution for deployment. As businesses, big or small become more global this will become a bigger problem. As I'm sitting here reading this I see a potential for new business. We need to find some way to filter traffic. Think about two different versions of the website existing at the same address and in front of the website sits a fork (like a fork in the road) that splits incoming traffic into two groups. As traffic comes in a portion, say 20% is then the diverted to your brand-new deployment while the rest, 80% is directed to your older site. It's almost like having an semi-open beta in regards to the new deployment. It will be tested in real time under real circumstances. Then as bugs get ironed out you can increase the ratio from 80 – 20 gradually until all traffic is now being fed into the brand-new live site.
so who wants to co-found this with me? we might be able to make it in time for the next round of Y Combinator!by the way I didn't think you were saying that you should deploy during your busiest time, I just met all things being equal, the should definitely look for "off-peak" times to rollout new deployments. But we both seem to agree that the long-term solution. Globalization is going to make off-peak times a thing of the past. Hence see my solution above, we can get ahead of it and make some money.
bcrescimanno|14 years ago