The International Airlines Travel Agent Network (<a href="https://webstar.iatan.org/WebStarExtranetWEB/login.jsp" rel="nofollow">https://webstar.iatan.org/WebStarExtranetWEB/login.jsp</a>) 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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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 <i>profoundly irritating</i>. The website clearly worked fine, or I wouldn't be able to see the message. I understand if you can't <i>support</i> 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.<p>Ahem. Anyway. Institute "business hours" for your website at your own risk. Among your users you'll find it polarizing at best.
The B&H example is ridiculous and I definitely would churn if I ran into that.<p>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.
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.
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.
Relevant given a lot of the discussion here: Why some DVLA services don't work at night<p><a href="https://dafyddvaughan.uk/blog/2025/why-some-dvla-digital-services-dont-work-at-night/" rel="nofollow">https://dafyddvaughan.uk/blog/2025/why-some-dvla-digital-ser...</a><p>(they were frontends to old systems that were based on assumptions of when data would be submitted)
I really like Elle's Homepage[0] where the webpage is set to "sleep mode" during certain hours.<p>[0]: <a href="https://ellesho.me/page/" rel="nofollow">https://ellesho.me/page/</a>
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.<p>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.
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.<p>Like, I get live chat having hours… but a form?
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".
New Zealand's online Lotto (lottery) service only operates in strict business hours.<p>> 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.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotto_New_Zealand" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotto_New_Zealand</a>
Here's an example from August 2007 of a community college website that had hours:<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20070822082110/https://onlineservices.solano.edu/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20070822082110/https://onlineser...</a><p>> Hours: Monday-Friday, 7:00 am to 10:00 pm, Saturday/Sunday 9:00 am to 3:00 pm<p>> 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.<p>The next Wayback Machine snapshot, from May 2008, doesn't have the notice:<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20080519115756/http://onlineservices.solano.edu:80/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20080519115756/http://onlineserv...</a>
I've been working on <a href="https://joni-on-micro.site" rel="nofollow">https://joni-on-micro.site</a> - 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.<p>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.<p>(Still has some AI-generated content as filler - when I'm done, it'll be strictly human-only content)
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.<p>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.
The German fanfiction site fanfiktion.de has restricted reading times for certain explicit works:<p>> 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)
> 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.<p>So does KONAMI's e-amusement service, affecting arcade games and home versions alike: <a href="https://iidx.org/eamuse_maint" rel="nofollow">https://iidx.org/eamuse_maint</a>
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
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.
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.
Sidekiq - a background job framework for Rails, has an office hour, for which you have to RSVP for.<p>That seemed like a reasonable way to set boundaries but provide some entry level support.<p><a href="https://sidekiq.org/support.html" rel="nofollow">https://sidekiq.org/support.html</a>
A physical business can put up a closed sign. That closed sign has 24/7 uptime. (Sans vandalism, natural disasters)<p>I guess for a website you could do similar by flicking cloudflare over to an IP serving a were closed.<p>But you won't be competitive and you will lose customers!
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.
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.
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.
Various Japanese websites actually have business hours, though it’s been getting better since 2020’s.<p>Imagine a banking app not allowing onboarding outside 8:30-18:30 Mon-Fri or a municipal site just saying come back at 8am.<p>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.