Scheduled Downtime - What to do?

Hosting is doing infrastructure upgrades

[decaff]

Hi folks...

Looking for a bit of advice regarding a notice I just received...one of my clients is on a couple of dedicated boxes with an excellent hosting provider..this provider just notified us that on a certain date (soon) they are performing some critical infrastructure (powergrid updates) which will shut down segments of their data center for up to 4 hours .. our servers are included in the shut down...

They have this scheduled for the wee hours of the morning...over a weekend and predict 4 hours of actual server downtime..

What do you recommend I do prior to this to "notify" the bots of the downtime? if there is such a thing..?
With the servers offline...nobody will be finding the sites...for that 4 hour window..(we see human traffic/spiders 24/7)

These servers have an excellent history of uptime and the web sites hosted here are blazing fast ...

any ideas on this...?
suggestions are much appreciated from the excellent group of webmaster here at webmasterworld.com .....

decaff

[vkaryl]

I can't help you with the bots, but for your human traffic, you might consider a notice at the top of your pages which states that your host servers will be down for a few hours in the timeframe, and why. That way people will not be surprised (or assumedly they won't) if the site is temporarily inaccessible.

[henry0]

Can you set up a quick simple HTML page
on a site hosted on a server that will not be powered down
and set up a temp redirect to the major upgrade page...

regards

Henry

Edit
<<
Sorry it cannot work if the main one is powered down!
unless moving DN but that's not an option :)
>>>

[jamesa]

I honestly don't think you'll have a problem with this. The bots will revisit.

[decaff]

Thanks for the replies...

I believe I can't do anything regarding the bots..they come and go as they will...

The visitors might appreciate some sort of simple notice...I will work one up..

I did consider putting up a temp page on another host..but the dns stuff simply takes too long...oh if there was only such a thing as "flash dns" (minutes not days)...this would be way cool..

Thanks again..
decaff

[isorg]

If you had .info domains then it would be minutes not days.

[jamesa]

>> would be minutes

Actually that's determined by a setting in your domain's DNS record. Doesn't matter if it's a .com, .info or any other TLD.