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[mpyusko]

How about distributing Clients across servers based on primary region/ timezone. That way you could coordinate maintenance to more convenient times. midnight GMT is ~7EST. So when backups happen, it's still a high traffic part of the day for our time-zone.

10pm - 3 am EST is a good window for most in the US longitudes, but how about those in Japan, or australia?

I know it's a lot of work right now (too much for current clients/accounts) but maybe future clients/accounts could be placed on servers with this in mind.

[Matt R.]

Our plans are for all future servers to go at AtlantaNAP. We're in the process of taking a large cage with them which will house the majority of our infrastructure. It'll better allow us to concentrate our resources (e.g. local onsite staff) instead of spreading ourselves too thinly.

[mpyusko]

I didn't not mean geographically placing the servers based on client location... I meant designating servers as a geographical region. You'd still house your servers wherever they are, but group Australians on 1 server, Japanese on another, UK/Europe on another, so when you have to bring a server down for maintenance, you can do it at a more convenient time for that region/server. Daily backups run at midnight GMT right? Well if they were region specific servers, you could configure them to backup when it's not 5pm local/region time. My servers back up at 7pm local time (for me and my clients). I understand the Internet is global and many site have a global base. But reading around here many of them focus on specific regions. That is the basis for my suggestion.

[Matt R.]

It's definitely an interesting suggestion. I'll have to discuss with our billing and provisioning team and how we can do this. We're migrating to new billing software in the next month or so, so this would be the ideal time to do it.

[Alan B]

The drawback would be that peak business hours would be the same for most clients on the server. That means that instead of spreading load out over the day, with clients in many parts of the world, you concentrate the load in a smaller number of hours. There might be advantage to having clients from around the world on a server, so that peak time for one is sleep time for another.

[mpyusko]

That is a good point.... maybe they could test it with a couple servers first before implementing it system wide. I just know I've heard people from Australia and japan are using this system and the last network maintenance occurred in the middle of their day.