On Friday Network Solutions will be conducting a server upgrade. This upgrade will occur at 11:00PM EDT and will last approximately six hours. During this upgrade, your store will be inaccessible.

We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for choosing Network Solutions.

Sincerely,

The Network Solutions Ecommerce Team

JERRY,

Will the techs be putting up a 'splash' page so visitors coming to our site won't get a 'site unavailable??

A- its more professional
B- it helps prevent frustrating and losing customers.

Thanks!
Erik


'

Will the server service team be there real time on Saturday if there are any glitches over the weekened?

wow, that's a long downtime.

Are you able to share what types of upgrades will be occurring? In other words, is this aimed at increasing stability, performance, or more of a routine update?

I too would like more details as to what is being done on this upgrade. 6 hours of outage is a long time. And what will the users see when they go to our site during this time?

Agree and PS the link in our email went to an old update notice

Dave

Why on weekend? Who will be around in case any problem will happen.
and will are email work?

Jerry,

I'm a little concerned about this upgrade since most of my customers are west coast. Why is the upgrade taking 6 hours? I've been an IT manager for 20 years now and we usually build a new server and then point users to that server at some point in time ... but it does not take 6 hours.

Sorry to complain but with the recent data privacy issue and this 6 hour outage, I'm going to have some unhappy customers going into the holiday season. Can we have some re-assurance that there will be support staff throughout the weekend and a contingency plan has been put in place if the migration fails or there is an impact on performance.

Thanks
Mark

6 hours?

Are you guys out of your minds?!

Why 6 hours and who is to say 6 hours won't turn into an entire weekend?

Lets face it, your upgrades never ever go very well, and why are you doing this on a weekend? AGAIN!!!

I have to agree with all the posts here so far...6 hours is a very long time. All of us on the west coast have to face our sites being down from 8pm till 2am. Do you realize how much business we stand to loose at that time of night on a Friday night?

I really don't want to not be able to contact any support if there are problems over the weekend either....like the last time. We went a whole weekend with customer's not being able to place an order and almost half a week until the problems were fixed!

Updates should take place on a slow business night like a Tuesday or Wednesday night and should not start until at least 12am PDT.

I also would like to know what our customer's will see when they go to our site during this update.

we should get a prorated discount for the following month for the outage at the very minimum. I cannot tell you how many times our server goes down in the past few months for hours at a time and all i get is "yes this is a known issue". it would also be nice to get the update notes ahead of the update.

Will it really take that long? This is a busy season for us.
Should we have a splash page?

If the server upgrade will correct the seemingly endless server problems once and for all, I'm all for it. I agree that a splash page letting our customers know when our stores will be accessible again would go a long way toward making this less painful.

Would a splash page even work? This update is a server upgrade. Does this mean that when a customer clicks on a link to our web site they will see an error page saying this site could not be found, just like when the servers are down?? Will the NS "site under construction" page be displayed? What will the customers see during the site outage?

Does anyone have this information or can NS please shed some light and answer our questions!!

I agree. Friday night is a poor choice for web businesses to be down. Is it possible to put this off until next week?

I am a new business with ns, not yet launched. I'm discouraged by what I read here. How often does something like this happen? Also frustrated that I was directed to this forum from the announcement, but questions are not being answered. Could someone please respond?

Gee no reply from Netsol on this???

Ntoh Etta why are you doing these on a Friday night? Tue is a much better time to do updates since most have not gone as planned in the past ???

Dave

I assume (hope really) that the lack of response is indicative of a scramble to address above concerns.
6 hours seems like a long time, though for us Friday night is one of our slowest times so there is that.
If possible some sort of splash page would be helpful.
I really hope this upgrade will address stability, latency, and overall performance issues though.

Awaiting clarification from the powers that be.

Hi All -

I'm not sure I'll get all of your questions addressed, but I'll try to get most of them...

1. Any maintenance performed is either required for maintaining a healthy server/network/software or to make improvements. Maintenance windows are part of your service agreement and not eligible for compensation. And honestly one the reasons you have purchased a hosted solution is to avoid the expense of maintaining your own server, the trade off is you give a little control of when it occurs.

2. While in theory it may be possible for your site to be affected the whole window, this is extremely unlikely. The times we give are the window that we anticipate the ENTIRE process will take. Your site should only be affected for a portion of that window.

3. We do not do a splash page for sites because the server that would serve up that page is being working on during the maintenance. In order to do a splash page correctly, we would have to make changes to the DNS configuration of thousands of sites, and we do not have access to all of the domains. Furthermore, it would only dramatically increase the outage.

4. Our maintenance windows are chosen based on resource availability and when overall network traffic is lowest on average. We understand is will impact individual clients differently and it is regrettable, but try to do what is best for as many as possible.

Thanks

Brian

Hi Brian,

Can you tell us if this server maintenance will clear up the problem of the 11am slowness?
Thanks,
Nancie

I agree, with all of the complaints that have been posted, especially the slowness of the admin and storefront, I'm all in favor of the process. I have to say I'm one of the members who would object to upgrading during the week because we sell primarily to businesses who don't shop on weekends. It's a catch 22, and like Brian said:

Friday night at 11pm (8 Pacific) is probably the slowest traffic, how many people go out to eat on Friday night, to a show, club, etc. I try to think in the positive, and I've posted before, If YOU haven't had an ecommerce store with any other provider, you don't know how good you have it here. We've had two providers and while the system isn't perfect it is much better than some of the others out there. At least here you have techs that respond with accurate and detailed answers. System maintenance is always going to be an issue but it's a given, anything with any computer is always going to require it. Would you be more upset if they waited until the week before Christmas to do this? Of course you would, because then people would really be shopping. I just have to say to the NS Techs, THANK YOU for what you do... we know it can't be perfect and hopefully it will fix some of the issues. Even if it doesn't, we know you will continue working to find a solution.

Hi Nancie-

To my understand the network issue that was causing that slowness was repaired, however, if your site is still seeing regular slowness, you should be reporting that to Tech Support.

As I mentioned, maintenance is to improve or maintain the health of the servers. Since every site uses server resources differently at different times, it wouldn't be appropriate to speculate how it would impact an individual site. Of course, that is to say if you are not happy with your site performance, please contact Tech Support.

Brian

Hi Brian,

I had thought that the 11am slowness was fixed too, but had it happen again on 9/24. I did call tech support then. At that time tech support said they were still getting calls about it each day. I also called tech support yesterday when my site was completely unreachable (getting "server is too busy" errors) for at least an hour and a half (maybe longer; not sure exactly what time it started.) That problem seems to be resolved now. I don't know if it is in any way related to the 11am slowness, but it just seems like every time there has been a problem over the past few months, the server has been sited as the problem. So when I heard "server maintenance", my ears perked up. I hope that your maintenance does improve the health of the server as it seems to have been feeling a bit poorly over the past few months.
Good wishes,
Nancie

okay, a Friday night is fine so long as we can be assured someone will be monitoring the servers to insure any problem that might crop up over the weekend are addressed.

You see, when it comes to server upgrades on the weekend, somebody is going to have to pull some overtime. Its the nature of the beast. I am sure Netsol will stay on top of it all weekend, just like always.

After all I for one am fully aware of how flawlessly Netsol has performed over the last few months before and after Friday night upgrades. Usually any major problems are cleared up in 2 or maybe three weeks or less.

Hope & Change, my friends! Hope & Change!!

So I just want to take this opportunity along with kencantoo to give a great big great job shout out to my favorite ecommerce platform!

Thank You Netsol! Thank you, thank you, thank you in advance for a great server upgrade weekend!!

Yes, We Can!

Drill, Baby DRILL!!

This is an excellent opportunity for the Netsol team to gain redemption for some recent issues (regardless of whose team or department was at issue). If I was a consultant, I would advise taking this opportunity to build good will and prove that customer service is the priority by bringing it home. Please dont pass up this chance.

If this upgrade is smooth, and if there are support staff (diligently) in attendance - it will be well worth the effort.

...and I do believe that you can pull this off right.

I am curious, will tech calls be routed to foreign lands or stay within the US?
I have made some calls recently after normal hours and during and have been directed to somewhere far away. It is kind of pot luck whether or not the person you get completely understands your issue.