7 ms·

What if your website had business hours? (2022)

75 points by bobbiechen 2y ago

moffkalast 2y ago
And if my website had wheels, it would be a wagon
- 1970-01-01 2y ago
  And you can get wheels overnight via Amazon. Because they don't have business hours.
doubled112 2y ago
I am unable to scroll on this webpage, it just keeps snapping to the top. Should I blame Safari on iPhone?
- amendegree 2y ago
  Have the same issue on iPhone 16 pro, my solution process is to turn off adblocker (didn’t work), use reader (works great)
- adastra22 2y ago
  Website is closed for the day?
  - doubled112 2y ago
    Seemed like some of us would just need to window shop.
- bobbiechen 2y ago
  (Author here) Sorry about this! I'm seeing similar sticky scrolling in Safari on Mac for a narrow window (but it unsticks if I scroll fast enough...). I think this suggests something with the mobile view CSS. I'll keep investigating. In the meantime, try reader mode. Sorry again and thanks for reporting!
  - klik99 2y ago
    I was gonna post “What if your website wouldn’t scroll?” But kudos to you for recognizing it and reproing the bug! Good article and found the references interesting
  - jodacola 2y ago
    Had the same issue, iPhone 15 in Chrome. Scrolling quickly didn't help. What did help: rotating into landscape and scrolling in the margins. Scrolling on the very right side of the screen also worked in portrait. Once I scrolled down a bit, I was able to scroll normally afterwards. On the content: I enjoyed your article! B&H being closed for Sabbath saved me from almost blowing $10k on camera gear a few years ago... everything in my cart, but couldn't check out. I wouldn't say I churned, but I also didn't come back to purchase because I had pre-buyers remorse. As others in the comments have noted, though - I still come back and shop at B&H for other things, even though I've run into their closures. I actually like the humanity of it. For all the always-on-ness of the internet and websites... there's something innately "human" about something being closed, like B&H's site, that isn't upsetting to me.
cryptoz 2y ago
Another example is the IRS Employer ID site; only open during business hours. Frustrating when you go there on Saturday and get hyped to found your company, but I guess waiting 2 days to get an EID wasn't a big deal in retrospect.
flerchin 2y ago
The B&H example is ridiculous and I definitely would churn if I ran into that. However, we can just put business hours on support, and would expect that the websites would generally work, unmonitored, while the SREs maintained a normal 40.
- unsnap_biceps 2y ago
  Eh, B&H often has great prices for computer hardware and has a really excellent customer support for issues. I buy from them a few times a year and it's easy enough to just come back the next day rather then paying a few hundred dollars more to place an order now, especially when both options will ship at the same time regardless.
- mey 2y ago
  As a shopper at B&H, that has encountered it, it's never bothered me, but their product generally doesn't need to be next day. If it was instacart/travel etc then yeah, I would be somewhere else in a heartbeat.
- compyman 2y ago
  I guess they are willing to take that risk to fulfil their religious obligations - If you aren't allowed to do business it doesn't really matter if that business is online or in the store. But I think that if you are familiar with B&H this wouldn't really be a surprise and it's pretty rare that you find yourself unexpectedly needing a new SLR on saturday morning in my experience
- caseyohara 2y ago
  > The B&H example is ridiculous and I definitely would churn if I ran into that B&H is so good that I don't care when their online store is closed, I just come back later. That they are still in business (and flourishing, from what I can see) is proof that their service is so good that people are loyal. Chick-fil-A is famously closed every Sunday, yet is one of the most successful restaurants.
  - lotsofpulp 2y ago
foobahify 2y ago
A physical business can put up a closed sign. That closed sign has 24/7 uptime. (Sans vandalism, natural disasters) I guess for a website you could do similar by flicking cloudflare over to an IP serving a were closed. But you won't be competitive and you will lose customers!
- doublerabbit 2y ago
  If your website provides me a respectable and decent service I am going to take that over than say a website that's open 24/7. The same amount of quality will cost more for 24/7 availability so the likelihood of them cutting corners is more likely and thas causing a lack of quality. If however they don't then yeah, I guess you would. You can't even read amazon reviews without logging in, now all you get is an AI generated summary. My broadband provider is more expensive than the common domestic provider but they provide decent support so that's why I am content in forking the extra cost.
  - Ferret7446 2y ago
    Sure, but you'd probably prefer a website that provides a respectable and decent service that's available 24/7 and didn't go out of their way to specifically stop providing service some of the time, often for no technical or practical reason.
- flexagoon 2y ago
  > I guess for a website you could do similar by flicking cloudflare over to an IP serving a were closed. Huh? Why would you need Cloudflare and a separate IP for that? You can just have your server serve a different thing in certain hours
billy99k 2y ago
I've seen government websites like this: Closed after hours and on weekends.
- wincy 2y ago
  Unemployment phone number I had to call was like this. If you missed it no money that week.
- afarah1 2y ago
  Some Brazil government websites/apps have a "virtual queue" system. During traffic surges, such as when government allows people to withdraw part of their unemployment fund for one reason or another, the site/app loads normally but display a page placing you in a queue with a dynamically updated ETA, usually several minutes or hours. Example (news article in Portuguese): https://epocanegocios.globo.com/economia/noticia/2023/07/distribuicao-dos-lucros-do-fgts-usuarios-enfrentam-filas-virtuais-para-acessar-aplicativo.ghtml https://epocanegocios.globo.com/economia/noticia/2023/07/dis... A weird way to rate limit... I guess it perfectly emulates the real life experience of waiting in line for hours in government branches.
  - adiabatty 2y ago
    I remember having to wait in a queue to download maps and mods and whatnot for Quake and similar games in the late 90s.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- er4hn 2y ago
  Los Angeles property tax website closes during parts of the year when they are updating who paid taxes. Last year IIRC they were closed for a few months, including if you wanted to get records of paid property tax for other times.
gnabgib 2y ago
Related Our website is closed on Sundays (48 points, 8 months ago, 17 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40997086 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40997086
internetter 2y ago
Steam, for some reason, has server maintenance from 3-6PM PST on Tuesdays
- darknavi 2y ago
  Maybe their largest market is Europe? Or they make enough money that their engineers don't want to work late hours.
  - jodacola 2y ago
    Yeah! Or the team there prioritizes taking care of folks and maintaining boundaries between work and life by having that 3 hours of downtime during normal business hours. Would love to hear other stories of businesses doing similar activities during sane weekday hours.
    - jiggawatts 2y ago
      “Do it during the day without an outage.” is my approach. It requires specific technology choices and planning ahead, but it is especially simple in the web era because they all go through load balancers which are redundant themselves. The opposite example was Blizzard taking down WoW for half a day every week, which is an absurdly long time. Even if they had a single server per game world instance, they could have orchestrated updates using automation to take each instance down for a few minutes instead of all of them at once for many hours.
      - saalweachter 2y ago
        My memory was that people generally regarded Blizzard taking down WoW for half a day each week as a mercy, as that was the only time some players had to shower, sleep and eat :-P
  - fma 2y ago
    At my previous company (a Fortune 20) when I controlled maintenance for my applications...I scheduled it during the day because there is more resources if things screwed up. Rolling maintenance meant 0 down time, even if unsuccessful.
kappasan 2y ago
So like Gossip's Cafe? https://gossips.cafe https://gossips.cafe
farts_mckensy 2y ago
[flagged]
mandeepj 2y ago
> What if your website had business hours? That idea is contrary to the definition or reason for the existence of Websites.
- doublerabbit 2y ago
  Why? Who wrote the rule that websites need to be available 24/7? Just because the server is powered 24/7 doesn't mean the website has too. I turn off my personal NAS when I go to bed. No point keeping it on while I am asleep. In PDP days you were given a allotted time slot of usage.
  - lotsofpulp 2y ago
    Because the marginal cost of keeping the website is (presumably) negligible. The whole point is asynchronous communication and transaction.
  - mandeepj 2y ago
    > personal NAS You have complete freedom on things that you tag as "personal". A "business" is always looking to grow upwards and onwards.
    - doublerabbit 2y ago
      One could argue on a business though. A UPS truck is only going to deliver when you're awake. Sure, yes the back-office of passing the item through processing centres require 24/7 operation's for the delivery to reach from left side of the country to the right but if we were not conditioned to accept 24/7 as a thing, do you really need X in next day delivery when if XYZ CompShop was open and sold the same item for a reasonable/same price at a reasonable time for you? 24/7 provides convenience but convenience isn't always the greatest nor always the best. It's these businesses that make the price high for the local causing them to suffer per-se because we expect it all now.
    - munk-a 2y ago
      There are quite a few businesses that don't feel the need to grow but instead focus on providing a consistent service and good employee benefits. Keeping a website generally available 24/7 is usually pretty trivial of a cost compared to the costs for everything else in running a business so to me putting effort into limiting business hours seems unproductive. If you receive significant malicious traffic or attacks during off hours it may make sense but otherwise the cost of keeping the lights on for a server are usually marginal at most.
TheRealPomax 2y ago
Then half the world wouldn't be able to ever see it =)
munk-a 2y ago
B2B websites often can keep regular business hours - if your customer base is working professionals in NA then outside of 9AM-8PM EST your site traffic probably drops dramatically. At my company we looked at analytics and realized our traffic is almost exclusively 9-5 EST while most folks work 9-5 PST so we just do large deploys after 4 PST. I think being aware of your traffic patterns and incorporating that into business decisions is a great idea. OT, especially for potentially hair pulling off hours deployments, costs a lot of employee happiness - reserve it for when it's actually an emergency.
exprez135 2y ago
I recently had this idea about email servers. In addition to configuring my IMAP clients to normally fetch mail manually or more infrequently, I set up one mail server that “closes” from 7 p.m. till 7 a.m. my time. During that time, it returns a temporary error `450 4.3.2 We're sorry! The mail room is closed from 7 p.m. till 7 a.m. [Time Zone]. Email servers automatically retry, so your mail should be delivered in a few hours.` Depending on their mail provider and the time of evening, some will never see an error, while others will eventually receive the standard “Delayed Mail: no need to retry” message in their own inboxes. I see it as accomplishing three things: first, it tests email servers to see if they properly handle temporary delivery errors by retrying; second, it prevents me from checking my email after hours, or rather, leaves me overnight with only the email I got during the day, perhaps encouraging better habits; and third, it could provide an opportunity for others to consider assumptions about always-on digital services.
- dheera 2y ago
  > assumptions about always-on digital services And maybe also always-on humans, which some companies seem to ridiculously expect. I really don't understand this obsession with 24/7 uptime for non-critical systems. Requiring your engineers to be always on-call and debug something at 3am is a health hazard and should be treated like one. If a photo-sharing app is down at 3am, I'm sure the users can go to sleep and wait till 10am. This isn't some oxygen life support system. If you have that many users in multiple time zones, then hire people in multiple time zones. Even if TurboTax crashes on 4/15 at 11:35pm and the engineers don't fix it until the next workday, resulting in millions of people not being able to file their taxes, I'm sure the IRS might grumble a lot but would give people an extension. It'll all be good, and everyone will get to sleep .
  - lukan 2y ago
    "If a photo-sharing app is down at 3am, I'm sure the users can go to sleep and wait till 10am" There will be people, who will feel it is critical important to post some pictures at 3 am and they will get stressed, if it is not working (say people preparing an event and the pictures should be online the next day). But .. whether that is worth that engineers must be on call, is a differnt question. I never had a job like this and I know I would never accept it as default for myself.
ceejayoz 2y ago
WordPress.com's support ticket form, in its early days, had business hours - you'd have to submit the ticket the next morning. I remember being pretty baffled the first time I ran into it. Like, I get live chat having hours… but a form?
mvdtnz 2y ago
New Zealand's online Lotto (lottery) service only operates in strict business hours. > MyLotto operates between 6.30 am and 11 pm Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Sunday, and between 6.30 am and midnight on Wednesday and Saturday. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotto_New_Zealand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotto_New_Zealand
aantix 2y ago
Sidekiq - a background job framework for Rails, has an office hour, for which you have to RSVP for. That seemed like a reasonable way to set boundaries but provide some entry level support. https://sidekiq.org/support.html https://sidekiq.org/support.html
dgunay 2y ago
I see this a lot with municipal government or utilities websites. I rent and I'm not about to leave my state any time soon - it's not like I can "churn" and _not_ pay my power bill or go to a competitor.
andrewflnr 2y ago
The registration website for my community college was like this. At certain times of night (and maybe weekend? not sure) it wouldn't let me register, and would instead put up a message that it was closed. I found this profoundly irritating. The website clearly worked fine, or I wouldn't be able to see the message. I understand if you can't support it outside of business hours, but at least let me try, maybe, and we'll cross the support bridge if we come to it? There's no good reason (i.e. not reeking of incompetence) for the website to actually break in the few weeks of registration, so it's most likely a moot point in practice. Is there a hamster running in a wheel who powers the server? Does he have a union? Just let me sign up for my classes, you assholes. Ahem. Anyway. Institute "business hours" for your website at your own risk. Among your users you'll find it polarizing at best.
- makeitdouble 2y ago
  FWIW many institutions don't want a middle ground between a registration/request being received, and it being in limbo somewhere. We could compare it to refusing mailed in registrations or not setting up a post box for out of office submissions, those are long lived practices depending on the office, and they "just" brought it wholesale to the online world. If it's that much easier for the staff to hold a mental model of what they do and how they work, I'd respect their choice even if it feels so alien in the online side.
  - Dylan16807 2y ago
    Please explain how this "limbo" happens if I do an online registration at 2am but doesn't happen if I do an online registration at 2pm. There isn't a person walking through the system with me, making sure it worked right. I could understand an office that only accepts appointments or phone calls, but this is an online system that breaks that direct connection no matter what time of day you use it.
    - makeitdouble 2y ago
      This is the same difference irl between: - a post box you can leave your application - a filing tray at the registration desk next to the clerk For the later they have a real time handling of how much registration are coming in, and from who. They don't have to look at it realtime, but they have full control of the input and can either shut it down if needed, or immediately react to errors or issues. It was a long time ago, but I once had a school clerk phone me right after I submitted a request, to tell me their system is dead and they want me physically come fill out the papers. For them it was a straight equivalent to the tray at their office, except it's digital.
tdeck 2y ago
This sounds like it would be a thing in Japan. Is it?
- ranger_danger 2y ago
  Yes it is very much a thing in Japan, many sites are forced offline for "maintenance" in the early hours of every morning. Even physical ATMs can have business hours in Japan.
krisoft 2y ago
I think planned and managed downtime is okay. A website, especially commercial ones, going down randomly, without a human readable status page destroys trust in them. For example I planned to work on a project on sunday for which i would need some sterling silver sheets. My usual supplier is cooksongold.com, and since precious metal is such a high trust product I would be normaly very reluctant to go and search for a new supplier. But their website is on the fritz since yesterday. Which makes me think i need to find some new supplier. Who knows maybe they are going out of business even. Or maybe they are just having trouble with their database. That’s the kind of situation where the damage is. Where consumer behaviors can maybe permanently alter just because of some technical malfunction.
ivyirwin 2y ago
The International Airlines Travel Agent Network (https://webstar.iatan.org/WebStarExtranetWEB/login.jsp https://webstar.iatan.org/WebStarExtranetWEB/login.jsp) website, in addition to being extremely dated in its design, keeps business hours for accessing things like ID registration or travel agency certificate renewals. At first I thought it was a joke as the message displays something like, "we want to respect a work life balance and therefore only offer online services from X to Y." But for real, you can't access the online services during US based business hours. It is wrong in so many ways. First of all the site is determining when the appropriate business hours are for its users, not taking into consideration moonlighters or other night owls. And second, it's a service for travel agents!! who are supposedly traveling to other time zones. I get it if the people behind a service need to set limits on when they are expected to handle requests, but that doesn't mean the service shouldn't be available all the time. Good messaging and setting expectations for when requests will be handled are a much better solution in my opinion.
- zinekeller 2y ago
  Since that is a airline-related website, and you wouldn't probably believe me, but is this a possible case of very old backend systems running in batch outside of office hours? This is such a serious issue that some legacy government websites, like UK's DVLA, to this day still has an operating hours (https://dafyddvaughan.uk/blog/2025/why-some-dvla-digital-services-dont-work-at-night/ https://dafyddvaughan.uk/blog/2025/why-some-dvla-digital-ser...)
- hh2222 2y ago
  There was a time when I had to goto the bank in person during business hours and interact with a teller. There was zero chance of getting hacked, the tellers knew me, and I had to live a more intentional life. Perhaps business hours for a website means real people are there actively monitoring its security and activity.
  - aiiizzz 2y ago
    I should hope nobody's wasting their days doing that.
Lammy 2y ago
> Kingdom of Loathing, one of my favorite games growing up, has nightly maintenance windows - short daily ones, and a longer weekly one. And... that's about all that I found. So does KONAMI's e-amusement service, affecting arcade games and home versions alike: https://iidx.org/eamuse_maint https://iidx.org/eamuse_maint
cantrecallmypwd 2y ago
Being down costs money and wastes time. Find ways to have zero downtime migrations.
pm2222 2y ago
Add NY dol unemployment website to the list.
Semaphor 2y ago
FWIW, online banking in Germany was like this until ~10 years ago (maybe 15). Sundays and overnight, the service would be closed "for maintenance". That was "fun".
- netsharc 2y ago
  I can imagine the systems were rickety that it was more convenient to have routine maintenance hours. Routine in the sense of "We just need to wait until tonight to fix the problem", rather than "We need to fix this, we have to apply for a maintenance period, wait for it to be announced to the customers, etc, etc." Since it's Germany it'd have to go through to many departments and take at least a week to be approved.
HypnoticOcelot 2y ago
I really like Elle's Homepage[0] where the webpage is set to "sleep mode" during certain hours. [0]: https://ellesho.me/page/ https://ellesho.me/page/
rkagerer 2y ago
Canada's national tax authority website (CRA) has daily downtime from 3am - 6am EST. Which can be a pain for those on the west coast who can't find time to work on taxes until the wee hours.
- morkalork 2y ago
  In Québec the site for handling drivers licences used to be like that, no online services from 11pm till some early morning hour.
ehnto 2y ago
I was thinking about this just yesterday, mostly in relation to notifications and expectation management. Often enough people conflate an online form with a business process that takes place immediately, and get mad that someone didn't respond to them "for a whole day" when they submitted the form at 6pm.
yamakadi 2y ago
Various Japanese websites actually have business hours, though it’s been getting better since 2020’s. Imagine a banking app not allowing onboarding outside 8:30-18:30 Mon-Fri or a municipal site just saying come back at 8am. The e-Tax system and various other government services still have these as well, mostly as daily maintenance windows. Some services use it to run data clean-up, consolidation, backup, etc. tasks so it’s not without reason.
cellis 2y ago
Depends on what you're selling. Patek Phillipe, Vacheron watches? Never mind business hours, it's "By Appointment only". A USB-c to USB-a adapter that I need tomorrow? Yeah you better be open buddy, or prime will.
Cyphase 2y ago
Here's an example from August 2007 of a community college website that had hours: https://web.archive.org/web/20070822082110/https://onlineservices.solano.edu/ https://web.archive.org/web/20070822082110/https://onlineser... > Hours: Monday-Friday, 7:00 am to 10:00 pm, Saturday/Sunday 9:00 am to 3:00 pm > Online Services is an unattended service after 7pm Monday through Thursday, after 1pm on Friday and all day Saturday and Sunday. If you have problems or questions please call Admissions and Records during normal business hours. The next Wayback Machine snapshot, from May 2008, doesn't have the notice: https://web.archive.org/web/20080519115756/http://onlineservices.solano.edu:80/ https://web.archive.org/web/20080519115756/http://onlineserv...
forthwall 2y ago
I feel like many websites in japan used to close at night, even ones that were aimed at foreigners. I remember up until very recently the website to purchase the JR Pass was closed for "maintenance" between 11pm-4am, so midday US time. At some point in the last 5 years this seems to have changed though, probably due to covid
l3x 2y ago
Relevant given a lot of the discussion here: Why some DVLA services don't work at night https://dafyddvaughan.uk/blog/2025/why-some-dvla-digital-services-dont-work-at-night/ https://dafyddvaughan.uk/blog/2025/why-some-dvla-digital-ser... (they were frontends to old systems that were based on assumptions of when data would be submitted)
- ddmf 2y ago
  I was going to mention this as well, from memory updating the services is in the pipeline so they made this front end that honoured the timings - and then a temporary solution became permanent.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
rsynnott 2y ago
For a _very_ long time, my bank's website and app was down for a few hours every night, I think at around 3am. I think they only stopped doing this with PSD2, after which they needed to support card 3dsecure with the app 24/7.
d0x71 2y ago
This is actually a thing in the Bolika. You can not access government official sites after 10 pm.
aitchnyu 2y ago
In India, UPI payments can happen around the clock but NEFT transfers after 8 pm waits till next day. Both handle similar orders of magnitude of money and are free, although UPI is more recent and meant for smartphones. There is also RTGS, which is realtime and costs a 1/17 USD and handles more money.
k0ns0l 2y ago
no please :(
camel-cdr 2y ago
The German fanfiction site fanfiktion.de has restricted reading times for certain explicit works: > This story has been classified as developmentally harmful and has been given special protection measures. It can therefore only be read by registered users and only between 11:00 pm and 4:00 am. Registered users have the option of carrying out age verification with us in order to be able to read such stories without time restrictions. (google translated)
averagewagon 2y ago
I've been working on https://joni-on-micro.site https://joni-on-micro.site - which is hosted on an ESP32-S3 using the built-in esp-httpd, with Hugo for static site generation. This is the first time I'm posting it publicly, so I'm interested to see if it'll stay up. I love the idea of a website with constraints that users can feel - and if I ever get too many concurrent visitors, I'll naturally stop serving requests. (Still has some AI-generated content as filler - when I'm done, it'll be strictly human-only content)
balfirevic 2y ago
Ah, great, as if it wasn't enough that most of the offline world is out of sync with us night-owls.

75 points by bobbiechen 2y ago

moffkalast 2y ago

And if my website had wheels, it would be a wagon

1970-01-01 2y ago
And you can get wheels overnight via Amazon. Because they don't have business hours.

doubled112 2y ago

I am unable to scroll on this webpage, it just keeps snapping to the top. Should I blame Safari on iPhone?

amendegree 2y ago
Have the same issue on iPhone 16 pro, my solution process is to turn off adblocker (didn’t work), use reader (works great)
adastra22 2y ago
Website is closed for the day?
- doubled112 2y ago
  Seemed like some of us would just need to window shop.
bobbiechen 2y ago
(Author here) Sorry about this! I'm seeing similar sticky scrolling in Safari on Mac for a narrow window (but it unsticks if I scroll fast enough...). I think this suggests something with the mobile view CSS. I'll keep investigating. In the meantime, try reader mode. Sorry again and thanks for reporting!
- klik99 2y ago
  I was gonna post “What if your website wouldn’t scroll?” But kudos to you for recognizing it and reproing the bug! Good article and found the references interesting
- jodacola 2y ago
  Had the same issue, iPhone 15 in Chrome. Scrolling quickly didn't help. What did help: rotating into landscape and scrolling in the margins. Scrolling on the very right side of the screen also worked in portrait. Once I scrolled down a bit, I was able to scroll normally afterwards. On the content: I enjoyed your article! B&H being closed for Sabbath saved me from almost blowing $10k on camera gear a few years ago... everything in my cart, but couldn't check out. I wouldn't say I churned, but I also didn't come back to purchase because I had pre-buyers remorse. As others in the comments have noted, though - I still come back and shop at B&H for other things, even though I've run into their closures. I actually like the humanity of it. For all the always-on-ness of the internet and websites... there's something innately "human" about something being closed, like B&H's site, that isn't upsetting to me.

cryptoz 2y ago

Another example is the IRS Employer ID site; only open during business hours. Frustrating when you go there on Saturday and get hyped to found your company, but I guess waiting 2 days to get an EID wasn't a big deal in retrospect.

flerchin 2y ago

The B&H example is ridiculous and I definitely would churn if I ran into that. However, we can just put business hours on support, and would expect that the websites would generally work, unmonitored, while the SREs maintained a normal 40.

unsnap_biceps 2y ago
Eh, B&H often has great prices for computer hardware and has a really excellent customer support for issues. I buy from them a few times a year and it's easy enough to just come back the next day rather then paying a few hundred dollars more to place an order now, especially when both options will ship at the same time regardless.
mey 2y ago
As a shopper at B&H, that has encountered it, it's never bothered me, but their product generally doesn't need to be next day. If it was instacart/travel etc then yeah, I would be somewhere else in a heartbeat.
compyman 2y ago
I guess they are willing to take that risk to fulfil their religious obligations - If you aren't allowed to do business it doesn't really matter if that business is online or in the store. But I think that if you are familiar with B&H this wouldn't really be a surprise and it's pretty rare that you find yourself unexpectedly needing a new SLR on saturday morning in my experience
caseyohara 2y ago
> The B&H example is ridiculous and I definitely would churn if I ran into that B&H is so good that I don't care when their online store is closed, I just come back later. That they are still in business (and flourishing, from what I can see) is proof that their service is so good that people are loyal. Chick-fil-A is famously closed every Sunday, yet is one of the most successful restaurants.
- lotsofpulp 2y ago

foobahify 2y ago

A physical business can put up a closed sign. That closed sign has 24/7 uptime. (Sans vandalism, natural disasters) I guess for a website you could do similar by flicking cloudflare over to an IP serving a were closed. But you won't be competitive and you will lose customers!

doublerabbit 2y ago
If your website provides me a respectable and decent service I am going to take that over than say a website that's open 24/7. The same amount of quality will cost more for 24/7 availability so the likelihood of them cutting corners is more likely and thas causing a lack of quality. If however they don't then yeah, I guess you would. You can't even read amazon reviews without logging in, now all you get is an AI generated summary. My broadband provider is more expensive than the common domestic provider but they provide decent support so that's why I am content in forking the extra cost.
- Ferret7446 2y ago
  Sure, but you'd probably prefer a website that provides a respectable and decent service that's available 24/7 and didn't go out of their way to specifically stop providing service some of the time, often for no technical or practical reason.
flexagoon 2y ago
> I guess for a website you could do similar by flicking cloudflare over to an IP serving a were closed. Huh? Why would you need Cloudflare and a separate IP for that? You can just have your server serve a different thing in certain hours

billy99k 2y ago

I've seen government websites like this: Closed after hours and on weekends.

wincy 2y ago
Unemployment phone number I had to call was like this. If you missed it no money that week.
afarah1 2y ago
Some Brazil government websites/apps have a "virtual queue" system. During traffic surges, such as when government allows people to withdraw part of their unemployment fund for one reason or another, the site/app loads normally but display a page placing you in a queue with a dynamically updated ETA, usually several minutes or hours. Example (news article in Portuguese): https://epocanegocios.globo.com/economia/noticia/2023/07/distribuicao-dos-lucros-do-fgts-usuarios-enfrentam-filas-virtuais-para-acessar-aplicativo.ghtml https://epocanegocios.globo.com/economia/noticia/2023/07/dis... A weird way to rate limit... I guess it perfectly emulates the real life experience of waiting in line for hours in government branches.
- adiabatty 2y ago
  I remember having to wait in a queue to download maps and mods and whatnot for Quake and similar games in the late 90s.
deleted 2y ago
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er4hn 2y ago
Los Angeles property tax website closes during parts of the year when they are updating who paid taxes. Last year IIRC they were closed for a few months, including if you wanted to get records of paid property tax for other times.

gnabgib 2y ago

Related Our website is closed on Sundays (48 points, 8 months ago, 17 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40997086 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40997086

internetter 2y ago

Steam, for some reason, has server maintenance from 3-6PM PST on Tuesdays

darknavi 2y ago
Maybe their largest market is Europe? Or they make enough money that their engineers don't want to work late hours.
- jodacola 2y ago
  Yeah! Or the team there prioritizes taking care of folks and maintaining boundaries between work and life by having that 3 hours of downtime during normal business hours. Would love to hear other stories of businesses doing similar activities during sane weekday hours.
  - jiggawatts 2y ago
    “Do it during the day without an outage.” is my approach. It requires specific technology choices and planning ahead, but it is especially simple in the web era because they all go through load balancers which are redundant themselves. The opposite example was Blizzard taking down WoW for half a day every week, which is an absurdly long time. Even if they had a single server per game world instance, they could have orchestrated updates using automation to take each instance down for a few minutes instead of all of them at once for many hours.
    - saalweachter 2y ago
      My memory was that people generally regarded Blizzard taking down WoW for half a day each week as a mercy, as that was the only time some players had to shower, sleep and eat :-P
- fma 2y ago
  At my previous company (a Fortune 20) when I controlled maintenance for my applications...I scheduled it during the day because there is more resources if things screwed up. Rolling maintenance meant 0 down time, even if unsuccessful.

kappasan 2y ago

So like Gossip's Cafe? https://gossips.cafe https://gossips.cafe

farts_mckensy 2y ago

[flagged]

mandeepj 2y ago

> What if your website had business hours? That idea is contrary to the definition or reason for the existence of Websites.

doublerabbit 2y ago
Why? Who wrote the rule that websites need to be available 24/7? Just because the server is powered 24/7 doesn't mean the website has too. I turn off my personal NAS when I go to bed. No point keeping it on while I am asleep. In PDP days you were given a allotted time slot of usage.
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  Because the marginal cost of keeping the website is (presumably) negligible. The whole point is asynchronous communication and transaction.
- mandeepj 2y ago
  > personal NAS You have complete freedom on things that you tag as "personal". A "business" is always looking to grow upwards and onwards.
  - doublerabbit 2y ago
    One could argue on a business though. A UPS truck is only going to deliver when you're awake. Sure, yes the back-office of passing the item through processing centres require 24/7 operation's for the delivery to reach from left side of the country to the right but if we were not conditioned to accept 24/7 as a thing, do you really need X in next day delivery when if XYZ CompShop was open and sold the same item for a reasonable/same price at a reasonable time for you? 24/7 provides convenience but convenience isn't always the greatest nor always the best. It's these businesses that make the price high for the local causing them to suffer per-se because we expect it all now.
  - munk-a 2y ago
    There are quite a few businesses that don't feel the need to grow but instead focus on providing a consistent service and good employee benefits. Keeping a website generally available 24/7 is usually pretty trivial of a cost compared to the costs for everything else in running a business so to me putting effort into limiting business hours seems unproductive. If you receive significant malicious traffic or attacks during off hours it may make sense but otherwise the cost of keeping the lights on for a server are usually marginal at most.

TheRealPomax 2y ago

Then half the world wouldn't be able to ever see it =)

munk-a 2y ago

B2B websites often can keep regular business hours - if your customer base is working professionals in NA then outside of 9AM-8PM EST your site traffic probably drops dramatically. At my company we looked at analytics and realized our traffic is almost exclusively 9-5 EST while most folks work 9-5 PST so we just do large deploys after 4 PST. I think being aware of your traffic patterns and incorporating that into business decisions is a great idea. OT, especially for potentially hair pulling off hours deployments, costs a lot of employee happiness - reserve it for when it's actually an emergency.

exprez135 2y ago

I recently had this idea about email servers. In addition to configuring my IMAP clients to normally fetch mail manually or more infrequently, I set up one mail server that “closes” from 7 p.m. till 7 a.m. my time. During that time, it returns a temporary error `450 4.3.2 We're sorry! The mail room is closed from 7 p.m. till 7 a.m. [Time Zone]. Email servers automatically retry, so your mail should be delivered in a few hours.` Depending on their mail provider and the time of evening, some will never see an error, while others will eventually receive the standard “Delayed Mail: no need to retry” message in their own inboxes. I see it as accomplishing three things: first, it tests email servers to see if they properly handle temporary delivery errors by retrying; second, it prevents me from checking my email after hours, or rather, leaves me overnight with only the email I got during the day, perhaps encouraging better habits; and third, it could provide an opportunity for others to consider assumptions about always-on digital services.

dheera 2y ago
> assumptions about always-on digital services And maybe also always-on humans, which some companies seem to ridiculously expect. I really don't understand this obsession with 24/7 uptime for non-critical systems. Requiring your engineers to be always on-call and debug something at 3am is a health hazard and should be treated like one. If a photo-sharing app is down at 3am, I'm sure the users can go to sleep and wait till 10am. This isn't some oxygen life support system. If you have that many users in multiple time zones, then hire people in multiple time zones. Even if TurboTax crashes on 4/15 at 11:35pm and the engineers don't fix it until the next workday, resulting in millions of people not being able to file their taxes, I'm sure the IRS might grumble a lot but would give people an extension. It'll all be good, and everyone will get to sleep .
- lukan 2y ago
  "If a photo-sharing app is down at 3am, I'm sure the users can go to sleep and wait till 10am" There will be people, who will feel it is critical important to post some pictures at 3 am and they will get stressed, if it is not working (say people preparing an event and the pictures should be online the next day). But .. whether that is worth that engineers must be on call, is a differnt question. I never had a job like this and I know I would never accept it as default for myself.

ceejayoz 2y ago

WordPress.com's support ticket form, in its early days, had business hours - you'd have to submit the ticket the next morning. I remember being pretty baffled the first time I ran into it. Like, I get live chat having hours… but a form?

mvdtnz 2y ago

New Zealand's online Lotto (lottery) service only operates in strict business hours. > MyLotto operates between 6.30 am and 11 pm Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Sunday, and between 6.30 am and midnight on Wednesday and Saturday. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotto_New_Zealand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotto_New_Zealand

aantix 2y ago

Sidekiq - a background job framework for Rails, has an office hour, for which you have to RSVP for. That seemed like a reasonable way to set boundaries but provide some entry level support. https://sidekiq.org/support.html https://sidekiq.org/support.html

dgunay 2y ago

I see this a lot with municipal government or utilities websites. I rent and I'm not about to leave my state any time soon - it's not like I can "churn" and _not_ pay my power bill or go to a competitor.

andrewflnr 2y ago

The registration website for my community college was like this. At certain times of night (and maybe weekend? not sure) it wouldn't let me register, and would instead put up a message that it was closed. I found this profoundly irritating. The website clearly worked fine, or I wouldn't be able to see the message. I understand if you can't support it outside of business hours, but at least let me try, maybe, and we'll cross the support bridge if we come to it? There's no good reason (i.e. not reeking of incompetence) for the website to actually break in the few weeks of registration, so it's most likely a moot point in practice. Is there a hamster running in a wheel who powers the server? Does he have a union? Just let me sign up for my classes, you assholes. Ahem. Anyway. Institute "business hours" for your website at your own risk. Among your users you'll find it polarizing at best.

makeitdouble 2y ago
FWIW many institutions don't want a middle ground between a registration/request being received, and it being in limbo somewhere. We could compare it to refusing mailed in registrations or not setting up a post box for out of office submissions, those are long lived practices depending on the office, and they "just" brought it wholesale to the online world. If it's that much easier for the staff to hold a mental model of what they do and how they work, I'd respect their choice even if it feels so alien in the online side.
- Dylan16807 2y ago
  Please explain how this "limbo" happens if I do an online registration at 2am but doesn't happen if I do an online registration at 2pm. There isn't a person walking through the system with me, making sure it worked right. I could understand an office that only accepts appointments or phone calls, but this is an online system that breaks that direct connection no matter what time of day you use it.
  - makeitdouble 2y ago
    This is the same difference irl between: - a post box you can leave your application - a filing tray at the registration desk next to the clerk For the later they have a real time handling of how much registration are coming in, and from who. They don't have to look at it realtime, but they have full control of the input and can either shut it down if needed, or immediately react to errors or issues. It was a long time ago, but I once had a school clerk phone me right after I submitted a request, to tell me their system is dead and they want me physically come fill out the papers. For them it was a straight equivalent to the tray at their office, except it's digital.

tdeck 2y ago

This sounds like it would be a thing in Japan. Is it?

ranger_danger 2y ago
Yes it is very much a thing in Japan, many sites are forced offline for "maintenance" in the early hours of every morning. Even physical ATMs can have business hours in Japan.

krisoft 2y ago

I think planned and managed downtime is okay. A website, especially commercial ones, going down randomly, without a human readable status page destroys trust in them. For example I planned to work on a project on sunday for which i would need some sterling silver sheets. My usual supplier is cooksongold.com, and since precious metal is such a high trust product I would be normaly very reluctant to go and search for a new supplier. But their website is on the fritz since yesterday. Which makes me think i need to find some new supplier. Who knows maybe they are going out of business even. Or maybe they are just having trouble with their database. That’s the kind of situation where the damage is. Where consumer behaviors can maybe permanently alter just because of some technical malfunction.

ivyirwin 2y ago

The International Airlines Travel Agent Network (https://webstar.iatan.org/WebStarExtranetWEB/login.jsp https://webstar.iatan.org/WebStarExtranetWEB/login.jsp) website, in addition to being extremely dated in its design, keeps business hours for accessing things like ID registration or travel agency certificate renewals. At first I thought it was a joke as the message displays something like, "we want to respect a work life balance and therefore only offer online services from X to Y." But for real, you can't access the online services during US based business hours. It is wrong in so many ways. First of all the site is determining when the appropriate business hours are for its users, not taking into consideration moonlighters or other night owls. And second, it's a service for travel agents!! who are supposedly traveling to other time zones. I get it if the people behind a service need to set limits on when they are expected to handle requests, but that doesn't mean the service shouldn't be available all the time. Good messaging and setting expectations for when requests will be handled are a much better solution in my opinion.

zinekeller 2y ago
Since that is a airline-related website, and you wouldn't probably believe me, but is this a possible case of very old backend systems running in batch outside of office hours? This is such a serious issue that some legacy government websites, like UK's DVLA, to this day still has an operating hours (https://dafyddvaughan.uk/blog/2025/why-some-dvla-digital-services-dont-work-at-night/ https://dafyddvaughan.uk/blog/2025/why-some-dvla-digital-ser...)
hh2222 2y ago
There was a time when I had to goto the bank in person during business hours and interact with a teller. There was zero chance of getting hacked, the tellers knew me, and I had to live a more intentional life. Perhaps business hours for a website means real people are there actively monitoring its security and activity.
- aiiizzz 2y ago
  I should hope nobody's wasting their days doing that.

Lammy 2y ago

> Kingdom of Loathing, one of my favorite games growing up, has nightly maintenance windows - short daily ones, and a longer weekly one. And... that's about all that I found. So does KONAMI's e-amusement service, affecting arcade games and home versions alike: https://iidx.org/eamuse_maint https://iidx.org/eamuse_maint

cantrecallmypwd 2y ago

Being down costs money and wastes time. Find ways to have zero downtime migrations.

pm2222 2y ago

Add NY dol unemployment website to the list.

Semaphor 2y ago

FWIW, online banking in Germany was like this until ~10 years ago (maybe 15). Sundays and overnight, the service would be closed "for maintenance". That was "fun".

netsharc 2y ago
I can imagine the systems were rickety that it was more convenient to have routine maintenance hours. Routine in the sense of "We just need to wait until tonight to fix the problem", rather than "We need to fix this, we have to apply for a maintenance period, wait for it to be announced to the customers, etc, etc." Since it's Germany it'd have to go through to many departments and take at least a week to be approved.

HypnoticOcelot 2y ago

I really like Elle's Homepage[0] where the webpage is set to "sleep mode" during certain hours. [0]: https://ellesho.me/page/ https://ellesho.me/page/

rkagerer 2y ago

Canada's national tax authority website (CRA) has daily downtime from 3am - 6am EST. Which can be a pain for those on the west coast who can't find time to work on taxes until the wee hours.

morkalork 2y ago
In Québec the site for handling drivers licences used to be like that, no online services from 11pm till some early morning hour.

ehnto 2y ago

I was thinking about this just yesterday, mostly in relation to notifications and expectation management. Often enough people conflate an online form with a business process that takes place immediately, and get mad that someone didn't respond to them "for a whole day" when they submitted the form at 6pm.

yamakadi 2y ago

Various Japanese websites actually have business hours, though it’s been getting better since 2020’s. Imagine a banking app not allowing onboarding outside 8:30-18:30 Mon-Fri or a municipal site just saying come back at 8am. The e-Tax system and various other government services still have these as well, mostly as daily maintenance windows. Some services use it to run data clean-up, consolidation, backup, etc. tasks so it’s not without reason.

cellis 2y ago

Depends on what you're selling. Patek Phillipe, Vacheron watches? Never mind business hours, it's "By Appointment only". A USB-c to USB-a adapter that I need tomorrow? Yeah you better be open buddy, or prime will.

Cyphase 2y ago

Here's an example from August 2007 of a community college website that had hours: https://web.archive.org/web/20070822082110/https://onlineservices.solano.edu/ https://web.archive.org/web/20070822082110/https://onlineser... > Hours: Monday-Friday, 7:00 am to 10:00 pm, Saturday/Sunday 9:00 am to 3:00 pm > Online Services is an unattended service after 7pm Monday through Thursday, after 1pm on Friday and all day Saturday and Sunday. If you have problems or questions please call Admissions and Records during normal business hours. The next Wayback Machine snapshot, from May 2008, doesn't have the notice: https://web.archive.org/web/20080519115756/http://onlineservices.solano.edu:80/ https://web.archive.org/web/20080519115756/http://onlineserv...

forthwall 2y ago

I feel like many websites in japan used to close at night, even ones that were aimed at foreigners. I remember up until very recently the website to purchase the JR Pass was closed for "maintenance" between 11pm-4am, so midday US time. At some point in the last 5 years this seems to have changed though, probably due to covid

l3x 2y ago

Relevant given a lot of the discussion here: Why some DVLA services don't work at night https://dafyddvaughan.uk/blog/2025/why-some-dvla-digital-services-dont-work-at-night/ https://dafyddvaughan.uk/blog/2025/why-some-dvla-digital-ser... (they were frontends to old systems that were based on assumptions of when data would be submitted)

ddmf 2y ago
I was going to mention this as well, from memory updating the services is in the pipeline so they made this front end that honoured the timings - and then a temporary solution became permanent.

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rsynnott 2y ago

For a _very_ long time, my bank's website and app was down for a few hours every night, I think at around 3am. I think they only stopped doing this with PSD2, after which they needed to support card 3dsecure with the app 24/7.

d0x71 2y ago

This is actually a thing in the Bolika. You can not access government official sites after 10 pm.

aitchnyu 2y ago

In India, UPI payments can happen around the clock but NEFT transfers after 8 pm waits till next day. Both handle similar orders of magnitude of money and are free, although UPI is more recent and meant for smartphones. There is also RTGS, which is realtime and costs a 1/17 USD and handles more money.

k0ns0l 2y ago

no please :(

camel-cdr 2y ago

The German fanfiction site fanfiktion.de has restricted reading times for certain explicit works: > This story has been classified as developmentally harmful and has been given special protection measures. It can therefore only be read by registered users and only between 11:00 pm and 4:00 am. Registered users have the option of carrying out age verification with us in order to be able to read such stories without time restrictions. (google translated)

averagewagon 2y ago

I've been working on https://joni-on-micro.site https://joni-on-micro.site - which is hosted on an ESP32-S3 using the built-in esp-httpd, with Hugo for static site generation. This is the first time I'm posting it publicly, so I'm interested to see if it'll stay up. I love the idea of a website with constraints that users can feel - and if I ever get too many concurrent visitors, I'll naturally stop serving requests. (Still has some AI-generated content as filler - when I'm done, it'll be strictly human-only content)

balfirevic 2y ago

Ah, great, as if it wasn't enough that most of the offline world is out of sync with us night-owls.