When I signed up for hosting, I of course opted for the SiteBackup service. Backups are second nature to me, and I couldn't "run naked with scissors" when it comes to my site. However, I notice that whenever the site is being backed up, it goes offline. I've seen where it's been offline for over an hour (May 15, 2017). Currently, there appears to be a backup running right now, and the site has been offline for 13 minutes. Heck, even the mail.*.* address quits working, so I can't get to my email. I've read somewhere here that WinHost has scheduled the backups for what is historically the average lowest traffic periods for most sites, so that kind of tells me that it is a known issue. Are there any plans to mitigate these outages during backup periods? Is it possible to maybe take a snapshot, back that up, and then collapse the snapshot? Or would I better off stopping the use of SiteBackup, and managing backups through MySQL/FTP and a scheduled task(s) ?
My mistake, then. Seems there still should be not be outages happening. If you've provided shared storage to your web servers, you should be able to update "offline" web servers, while continuing to hosts sites on the remaining servers, no? Then flip the hosted sites to freshly updated hosts, removing the to-be-updated hosts from the pool. Once the hosts are drained, then you can update them as well. I do this constantly, at my job, updating hundreds of hosts with no downtime. Kind of a standard operating procedure here. I can draw you up a diagram and method/runbook if you want.
Thanks Derek, but the Winhost platform consist of individual servers that do not use centralized file storage, so there is not a way to apply Windows updates without taking the servers offline (they are only offline while they restart to apply the updates). The update outages don't usually last long enough to be a big problem for most people, but the time needed varies depending on what's involved in the update. The SiteBackup service does not cause any interruptions.
