Monthly maintenance

We run the automated Windows Server Update Services on the second Wednesday of every month. This affects all the servers that run Windows O/S, which includes almost all of the customer-facing servers (web, SQL, etc.). Running the updates monthly makes for quicker updates overall, and a more consistent maintenance schedule.

The Windows Update will take place on the second Wednesday of every month, from approximately 6:00 p.m. to 3:00 a.m. Pacific time.

During that time the automated Windows Server Update Services will run. Depending on what is done to the servers a reboot may be necessary, which will extend the update by 5 or 10 minutes. We can't say how long the maintenance will take each month - some months there may be no interruption at all. The potential disruption depends on what Microsoft sends out to the service. But we wanted to make you aware of the new schedule to avoid any surprises.

Note also that Wednesday is also our weekly our maintenance window. So if any maintenance needs to be done outside of the automated Windows Server Update Services, you can anticipate it being done on a Wednesday evening.

Winhost serves customers worldwide, so unfortunately there is no ideal time to perform updates. We base our weekly maintenance window on the point that traffic on our network is at its lowest, and that is Wednesdays from approximately 6:00 p.m. to 3:00 a.m. Pacific time.

 

Important note regarding maintenance windows

There seems to be some misunderstandings regarding our weekly maintenance window as it relates to monthly scheduled updates.

While the monthly scheduled maintenance will always fall on the second Wednesday of the month, every Wednesday is a scheduled maintenance window. What that means is that scheduled maintenance can occur (but will not necessarily occur) on any Wednesday (and of course, unscheduled maintenance can occur at any time).