What if your website had business hours? (2022)
117 comments
·April 10, 2025ivyirwin
hh2222
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
I should hope nobody's wasting their days doing that.
zinekeller
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-ser...)
exprez135
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
> 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 .
Dylan16807
> 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 .
That's way too big of a risk, and way too much stress to put on your customers.
For something like tax software, you should have people on call, or even 24/7 staffing, for that specific week. 2% of the year.
In general, big release dates or important deadline should often have extra resources. 0-10 days per year. Pay extra for the health hazard, but that doesn't mean don't do it.
KronisLV
> For something like tax software, you should have people on call, or even 24/7 staffing, for that specific week.
In my country, the tax system (EDS, Electronic Declaration System) is down pretty much every single year on the day when tax declaration submissions start.
2020: "SRS: Significantly increasing EDS capacity is expensive and not cost-effective" https://www-lsm-lv.translate.goog/raksts/zinas/ekonomika/vid...
2022: "SRS urges not to rush to submit annual income tax returns so as not to overload the EDS" https://www-lsm-lv.translate.goog/raksts/zinas/ekonomika/vid...
2023: "The SRS urges not to rush to submit income tax returns in the first days of March" https://www-lsm-lv.translate.goog/raksts/zinas/ekonomika/vid...
2025: "A virtual queue will be open this year for submitting annual income tax returns to the SRS" https://www-lsm-lv.translate.goog/raksts/zinas/ekonomika/28....
So basically their "solution" for the longest time was to just tell people that it's too expensive to make it have high availability and that they shouldn't use the system on the first days of the period when you can submit the data and eventually just adding a queue in front of the system to manage the concurrent users.
It seems that taxes still get handled correctly and that nobody really cares that much. Found this to be an interesting example of going against the established culture of trying to go above and beyond for availability, even if I scoffed at it a few years ago.
It definitely wouldn't be horrible to live in a world where a prod outage doesn't mean "Sorry wife, I'm not coming home today, will be stuck in some random war room for hours and then fudge up the groceries massively due to sleep deprivation" but rather "Sorry boss, the system is down, what a bummer. I'll look into it tomorrow at 9 AM." for pretty much anything aside from truly critical and time sensitive systems (e.g. air traffic control, as opposed to your music streaming app).
dheera
I disagree.
The IRS can wait. If a million people can't file their taxes the IRS will wait and I'm okay with that.
I'm not risking another cardiac arrest so that a bunch of people can file their taxes on time.
lukan
"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.
em-bee
just before going to sleep is the only time i do hobby stuff. in the morning i have to work. putting something off to the next day always means putting it off to the next evening. i don't care how long things take. i care that i can do them right now and then forget about them. if i can't do that then i have to keep the tasks in my mind. i can write them down, but that only helps if i have a habit of doing that.
sometimes i remember some important message i need to send colleagues or clients... for that i like the telegram feature where i can send a message with a delay. i can write it now and it will be sent the next morning or whenever i think is a good time. i wish my email client had that feature too.
genericperson66
It might be 3 am for you but 3 pm for the user
dheera
> people preparing an event and the pictures should be online the next day
They can use a different platform, print the pictures on paper, there are a million ways to deal with these kind of issues.
An earthquake could strike and the event might need to be postponed.
If nobody's life or health is at risk, it is not urgent enough to sacrifice someone else's health for it.
xtreme
If only 10% of Tax software users are affected, IRS may not give an extension and the customers would be cursing you. Probably worth it to keep those extra engineers on call during the tax season.
neilalexander
This reminded me somewhat of Pony Messenger which does one "mail drop" a day.
ryao
This would be an interesting variant of greylisting. Anything sent after business hours goes on the greylist.
andrewflnr
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
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
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
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.
dmurray
There's a mismatch with reality, because there really is a delay between a registration being received and someone starting to work on it.
This sounds like a beginner PM's plan for a task management system. Just make the status DONE or NOT_DONE, tasks are always done roughly instantly, stop adding complications with your intermediate states! Later this leads to bugs or at least poor UX because tasks don't finish instantly, and someone is convinced to add IN_PROGRESS. Eventually we add CANCELLED and FAILED and UP_FOR_RETRY and, if we're unlucky, a hundred more states. The benefit of those depends on the application but there's always a benefit in representing the three states instead of two.
andrewflnr
There was no limbo state. When the website was working at all, it was fully automatic and told you immediately if your classes were registered or not.
flerchin
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.
caseyohara
> 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.
gwern
One thing to note here is that the closure is a costly, credible, verifiable signal of commitment to their principles. Unusual or questionable principles, perhaps - few other Christians feel the need to close on Sunday - but principles nevertheless.
Suppose B&H or Chick-Fil-A suddenly changed their policy to be open, which is easy to verify (just see if you can buy something on that day). What do you think the reaction of their customers would be to this greater convenience and no loss of quality? Would they celebrate? I think the reaction would be highly negative - everyone would panic that they had sold out and the beancounters were now in charge and the quality was going to go downhill while the prices go up.
Precisely because the policy is so economically foolish and is not a marketing stunt (notice no one is clamoring to imitate them even though it's trivial: just close on some day) and would be one of the first things to go under new (ie. normal) management, it proves that they don't care that much about maximizing their profits but other things.
caseyohara
We’re saying the same thing.
I honestly don’t know much about B&H as a business but I’m a frequent customer. I have bought several expensive camera bodies and lenses from them, countless camera accessories, and it’s often the first place I look for all electronics. NAS, hard drives, cables, that sort of thing. I like buying from B&H because I trust them, they have fast shipping, and I’ve never had a bad experience.
It’s a high quality store. I value high quality and I like that they value high quality over maximizing profit. That makes me a loyal customer, and unless something changes about the quality of B&H, I probably will be for a long time. I don’t care that their online store is occasionally closed; it’s never been an inconvenience to me. And if it ever is, the quality of the store more than makes up for the minor convenience of waiting a couple days to buy something. When it comes to my gear and equipment, I’m rarely in such a rush that I’m willing to compromise quality for speed. I imagine a lot of other B&H customers feel the same way.
lotsofpulp
Closing a website and closing a physical retail establishment don’t seem comparable.
cantrecallmypwd
B&H is also a physical store that is also closed at that time too.
compyman
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
mey
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.
bramhaag
> The B&H example is ridiculous and I definitely would churn if I ran into that.
Not only does B&H close their webshop on Saturdays, they also observe many holidays and close both their physical stores and webstore for them. This month they are open for only 18 days due to Passover.
unsnap_biceps
I went and looked and the physical store is closed the full time, but they are accepting online orders Monday to Friday during Passover week, but are not shipping them until after.
zten
They're about to close for the entirety of Passover, so, if you thought <24hrs was bad, those of us who like them just aren't ordering for 9 days...
unsnap_biceps
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.
rkagerer
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
In Québec the site for handling drivers licences used to be like that, no online services from 11pm till some early morning hour.
billy99k
I've seen government websites like this: Closed after hours and on weekends.
afarah1
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/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
I remember having to wait in a queue to download maps and mods and whatnot for Quake and similar games in the late 90s.
er4hn
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.
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wincy
Unemployment phone number I had to call was like this. If you missed it no money that week.
cryptoz
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.
l3x
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-ser...
(they were frontends to old systems that were based on assumptions of when data would be submitted)
ddmf
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.
HypnoticOcelot
I really like Elle's Homepage[0] where the webpage is set to "sleep mode" during certain hours.
kappasan
So like Gossip's Cafe? https://gossips.cafe
krisoft
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.
ceejayoz
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?
The International Airlines Travel Agent Network (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.