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paul-lmipaul-lmi 

Down time during system maintenance

I received an admin email this morning indicating that when our instance receives the update to Winter '10, everything, including Sites on that instance, will be unavailable.  It indicated that a "branded maintenance page" would be served instead of our normal content.

 

I want to confirm, without any doubt, that this "branded maintenance page" is the page that I have confirmed for the HTTP 500/503 page for the site, and not some forcibly Force.com branded page I have no control over.

 

Showing a Force.com branded page when the capability to show one that I create is already in teh system is unacceptable in in our implementation, especially with the guarantee of 3 2-hour maintenance windows every year, and potentially more during actual unplanned downtime.

 

Someone from Salesforce Product Management, please respond.  We're on NA1 and slated for this update in 1 week.

Best Answer chosen by Admin (Salesforce Developers) 
BulentBulent

Unfortunately, the ""branded maintenance page"" until the Winter'10 release will be the Force.com branded generic maintenance page, not the customized one you associated with your site.

 

With the Winter'10 release we introduced a new error page lookup where you will be able to upload your own custom page that would be served from cache servers during the maintenance windows.

All Answers

BulentBulent

Unfortunately, the ""branded maintenance page"" until the Winter'10 release will be the Force.com branded generic maintenance page, not the customized one you associated with your site.

 

With the Winter'10 release we introduced a new error page lookup where you will be able to upload your own custom page that would be served from cache servers during the maintenance windows.

This was selected as the best answer
paul-lmipaul-lmi

Ugh.  So...how long is the actual down time going to be?  I know you guys give yourselves a generous window with 2 hours, but seriously, that much downtime multiple times a year on a production website is not going to help you adopt high volume customers.

 

How do you handle high-profile customers?  I can't imagine Dell would be super-happy about IdeaStorm being down for 2 hours per quarter planned, and whatever potential unplanned time that could occur...

lbasclelbascle

there is a 10 hour downtown planned for this weekend, Saturday, December 19th, 2009 at 7:00pm PST to 4:00am PST.

does that mean that all Sites will be down for the same amount of time??????

is you are in the GMT zone, that is totally unacceptable, as this is the BIGGEST WEEKEND of the year in terms of sales.

 
paul-lmipaul-lmi
i saw that it was mentioned that with winter '10, we can now push a zip file of our site's maintenance page out to the cache/edge servers during the typical 2 hour downtime.  this is fine for non-SSL scenarios.  what is SF doing to address downtime on SSL-required implementations?  we'd like to see some renewed effort in documentation when it comes to down time, expectations, and end user experience (our users, now your users).
paul-lmipaul-lmi
never got a reply for this.  what exactly is the current end user experience in force.com sites over SSL during system maintenance?
BulentBulent
https access bypasses all the caching, so custom maintenance page can't be served during down time when accessed via https (visitors would get server not found error)
paul-lmipaul-lmi
What is SF planning to do to mitigate that negative impact?  As it stands, we're pushed into a 2-6 hour downtime window quarterly, where we have no control over the user experience (and 404 is a HORRIBLE user experience), and no further detail or insight into actual downtime vs. downtime window.  What happened to the "5 minute upgrade" that was trumped up quite emphatically at Dreamforce?
paul-lmipaul-lmi
i'll take the lack of response as "we have no plan for SSL graceful maintenance"
BulentBulent
both zero down time and custom maintenance page are roadmap items.
paul-lmipaul-lmi
thanks Bulent.  hoping it's short term road map vs. long term.  we really want to ramp up our force.com sites usage, but I can't justify going all out until we get better uptime stats from the platform.
MarrisMarris

Hi Bulent

 

              Need help on the following.

 

              I created a customer portal using force.com sites. As per Summer 12 release. How to show my custom maintenance page in sites while salesforce announced a maintenance downtime.

 

 

Thanks

Marris