Why Do I Get More Alerts at Night?
There is actually a very simple reason why downtime is much more prevalent at night than during the day. It is a common practice among web hosting service providers around the world to frequently service their networks and servers at night and not during the day. The reason they choose to do this is simple: most of their customers are sound asleep at night and will not be disrupted by the short outage... that is everyone except for us that receive downtime Alerts.
Service providers typically service their networks and servers between 12 AM and 6 AM (within their time zone). While service providers sometimes do notify their customers of scheduled maintenance ahead of time, they only typically do this when it is a very risky operation or one that will affect all their customers. Many times, if the maintenance will only affect a small cross-section of their customers, the service providers will not bother to warn their customers. Unfortunately there are also a lot of service providers that just choose not to notify their customers at all, no matter what kind of maintenance they are doing.
Here are some common network and server maintenance tasks that are done at night:
Server & Router Software Patches
Server & Router Hardware/Software Upgrades
Server & Network Configuration Changes
Also keep in mind that there are multiple Service Providers contributing to your downtime events at night. These Service Providers include:
Your Hosting Company
The Colocation Companies your Hosting Company is contracting Data Center space from
The regional Communications Companies that are connecting the Colocation Company's Data Center to the regional Internet Backbone Carriers.
The regional Internet Backbone Carriers themselves and the interconnections between them.
As you can see, with all these companies servicing their networks and servers at night (within the same time zone), it is much more likely to have more downtime at night than during the day.
Related Links
Problem with Frequent Short-Lived Downtime Events
How Does AlertBot Eliminate False Alerts?
AlertBot System Redundancy and Scalability Explained
Service providers typically service their networks and servers between 12 AM and 6 AM (within their time zone). While service providers sometimes do notify their customers of scheduled maintenance ahead of time, they only typically do this when it is a very risky operation or one that will affect all their customers. Many times, if the maintenance will only affect a small cross-section of their customers, the service providers will not bother to warn their customers. Unfortunately there are also a lot of service providers that just choose not to notify their customers at all, no matter what kind of maintenance they are doing.
Here are some common network and server maintenance tasks that are done at night:
Server & Router Software Patches
Server & Router Hardware/Software Upgrades
Server & Network Configuration Changes
Also keep in mind that there are multiple Service Providers contributing to your downtime events at night. These Service Providers include:
Your Hosting Company
The Colocation Companies your Hosting Company is contracting Data Center space from
The regional Communications Companies that are connecting the Colocation Company's Data Center to the regional Internet Backbone Carriers.
The regional Internet Backbone Carriers themselves and the interconnections between them.
As you can see, with all these companies servicing their networks and servers at night (within the same time zone), it is much more likely to have more downtime at night than during the day.
Related Links
Problem with Frequent Short-Lived Downtime Events
How Does AlertBot Eliminate False Alerts?
AlertBot System Redundancy and Scalability Explained
Updated on: 10/10/2022
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