This Website Only Open During Business Hours | Hacker News Reader

This Website Only Open During Business Hours

freakonomics.com

51 pointsa5seo35 comments

What's funny about this is that it's actually harder to write a program that only works between certain hours than it is to write one that works whenever it's available. As I posted in another thread: maybe there wouldn't be a programmer shortage if programmers actually worked on things that were valuable. A program to prevent someone from pasting in their password and a program to take a web service offline at a certain time involves a fair amount of engineering effort, but makes the world a worse, more disorganized place.

I always thought the role of humans was to try to stave off the effects of entropy. Work like this makes entropy do its business even faster. Think about that when you're sitting in your chair 10^100 years from now and the Universe's protons start decaying all around you: this is your fault for implementing a website that only works from nine to five.

In that case, they may as well take it a step further and have their employees "open" the website when they clock in when they arrive, and "close" the website when they leave at night.

Good idea! The system can even have a message that says, "Although we plan to open at 9am, nobody has arrived to turn me on yet."

Regardless of that, it still makes no sense to time-constrict a websites uptime. It's not as if websites run on manual labour! (well, it takes some to create one)

The irony is that a site that says "someone needs to come in and turn me on" must already be turned on. They've already written an app that has 100% uptime, they just use their uptime to claim the system is down.

It could have to deal with scarcity, as time that is scarce is perceived to be higher valued, as booking office hours with a professor, for example. But that's just my economics take on it.

Disabling a website during certain hours is not a massive feat of engineering.

Some guesses:

1) Their backend crashes constantly during normal use, so they have to shut it down when nobody is around to babysit.

2) The form submits directly to some poor soul's email, who then has to copy it onto a piece of paper and drop it in a folder. To manage the workload, the form is simply disabled when this person is not around.

3) The job of "web server" has not been mechanized in this particular office, in order to preserve the charm that only comes from a web site lovingly typed in real-time by a hard-working civil servant.

I've seen this a few times. It's usually not quite as insane as it looks. The underlying reasons that I've seen are:

* The web site is tied to an old fashioned batch system/mainframe that doesn't run in the same mode 24/7. Yes, the implementors could write a separate queue that managed this - but that would be often be a non-trivial amount of work.

* It's for a system that provides the online equivalent of an offline process, which has escapes that occasionally push the user out to talk to a human being. The human's aren't available 24/7.

* It's for a system that provides the online equivalent of an offline process, and there are legal or social requirements that the applications be "fair" - i.e. that the people going through the online and offline process should have the same opportunities. Having the online system run 24/7 puts people with online access at a significant advantage.

Could be an ADA issue... ADA (or the state's interpretation/augmentation of it) may say that they need to have live assistance available and they don't want to staff that 24/7 (this is a business registration site, most usage probably happens during business hours).

I did a small amount of contracting for a local real estate company who only had their site online certain hours of the day. I asked them why, and their response was that they only had the one server, and during certain hours they needed it for processing new listings and database work. This was apparently such an intensive task on their budget server that the web server became unresponsive during these operations.

They also said their analytics showed that no one ever visited the site outside of business hours. This wasn't what I was contracted to do (and I wasn't in position to fix it), so I didn't bother to tell them that when they shut down the web server their analytics stopped running as well.

Also, if you have no or limited resources with which to handle off-hours system issues (errors, intrusions, etc), unplugging the site can be one form of KISS. (Assuming you know your audience will not migrate away or vote you out of office, etc.)

If you (effectively) subdivide your content pages from your processing pages (on a separate system), you can simply take the latter down.

It may not be ideal for today's idea of a 24/7 world. But if you're small, geographically local, and want your staff to have sane lives, it's possibly one approach to consider.

(And there are currently arguments circulating for reinserting some sanity and balance into the way we live our lives and jobs.)

This is actually probably for legal reasons -- there is probably some law on the books that the exact date and time of official company interactions with the Secretary of State must be recorded in case there are disputes, and that for some reason of arcane legal text this must be during the operating hours of the office.

Have you?

Yes. The site for the UK's "Companies House", an agency that registers and tracks British corporations, only used to work during work hours. I seem to recall a public hack day helped resolve this somehow but can't find a story about it now..

URLs say it all, no need to click unless you are curious:

http://my-site-keeps-shabbat.org.ua/ - SaaS (Shabbat/Shutdown as a Service)

http://kosherdev.com/2009/11/wordpress-plugin-to-lock-site-f...

Along those lines, B&H doesn't process web orders Friday to Saturday nights, local time only though. I'm not clear why the user's time is the one that matters above. You're the one operating the site, it should be your time. B&H's interpretation seems more reasonable. Though I admit to knowing next to nothing about the various rules. http://www.bhphotovideo.com/find/HelpCenter/HoursOfOperation...

The prohibition is that you can neither do work nor cause work to be done during the Sabbath. B&H's position is that order processing is "work", and that accepting a deferred order placement would constitute "causing work to be done" by their staff even though the actual work takes place later. Others might decide that the act of placing an order (rather than automatically accepting an order) itself constitutes "causing work to be done", and that would depend on the Sabbath hours at the customers' locations. A catch-all policy would cease operation at the beginning of the earliest Sabbath period and restart at the end of the latest (which could cause a very long shutdown indeed if extreme northern and southern latitudes are taken into account).

Well, in the Netherlands we used to have a bank whose internet banking site closed around 23:00 hours and re-opened somewhere in the morning. AFAIK it was because all actual processing was done in batch during the night. Somewhere around 2006 they implemented a new Internet banking infrastructure and now they're open 24/7.

I'm guessing they don't want to or can't provide overnight cover if it fails. The cheap solution is to turn it off when there is no support available.

My Canadian insurance provider, Manulife, has this same restriction as well as pretty much every financial institute in Japan. What's worse too is that many Japanese ATMs will charge extra fees when you use them outside business hours - even at your own bank.

SunLife in Canada is similar. The site is up but you can't do some things like submit an online health-care claim. My guess was/is they are trying to make it just a little harder to make claims.

The Swedish tax agency also has some arbitrary times to post forms through their web site. I've had it explained to me that this is done to prevent major backlogs with (most likely) erroneous data (as people who send in their tax declaration at 2 am might be more prone to errors than at other times).

This means that if they were to have 24/7 service the taxmen and women would start each day with a back log, and Mondays with a larger backlog and then probably get even more delayed than they already are.

Now, I don't know at all if this is true or not, but I find it a rather plausible explanation.

Funny thing: German tax department designed an API around polling tax data primarily for companies. I have to find an english link to the full story, but basically: - company develops api to pull data like a few hundret requests per hour initially, but API returns a 404 after an hour of testing - later that evening API returns an error stirng saying "open from 9 to 12 and 13 to 14:30" - next day tax department calls company saying that they cannot handle those requests as the API was designed to be used once a year and that they crashed the server on and on with the sheer amount of requests

If there is a human element in the loop, and with a government process it is fairly likely, then shutting down the website after hours and on weekends makes sense from a workplace environment point of view.

Walking in each morning to a huge backlog of work generated overnight is bad for moral...generating a backlog over weekends and holidays is even worse - spending one's Veterans Day off from work knowing that the backlog is piling up sucks.

My University has a class booking system that only works during the hours of 9am - 5pm; outside that, and you're not allowed to put bookings in. When you put a booking in, it sits "loading" for a few minutes (spinner GIF in a modal dialog).

(I have visions of people sitting behind desks ticking off bookings in real-time as they come in, like telephone operators from the 40s.)

My U's class registration system is also only open during "working" hours (a bit of a broader range, but same idea and nothing on weekends), although it's rather faster and obviously all automated at this point. It's very old software though - I get the feeling that the restrictions were put there to avoid giving a registration advantage (for popular classes) to those who could afford then-new technology. In 1996, a good solution. Now...

My school did this as well, but they claimed it was for maintenance reasons. Seemed like they were always tweaking it to withstand the load during course selection time. Maybe it's just easier to have regular down time than unpredictable down time.

This is done to save money. There's probably a rack of boxes handling the dirty work. 99% of users of the system are local, as in the same time zone. So if you kill the boxes at night, you save half of your electricity bill with minimal inconvenience.

Obviously you can solve your little dilemma in the cloud by scaling based on demand, but not everything can be put into EC2 or similar. Government sites that handle sensitive data certainly can't.

I can't imagine this is the reason. They need something to throw up that ridiculous message...why not use it to handle requests to the site too? How much traffic does a site like this get?

The electricity costs for such a site is probably a couple a bucks a day. It would be very weird if they were really turning of the servers every night just to save a few dollars.

Especially considering electricity costs less at night.

The Dutch Chamber of Commerce closes down its trade register between midnight and 9am or so. Because, of course, you should be sleeping then instead of doing business!

We have a customer only allowing registration for a webshop during working hours(!). In that case, it wasn't about marginal power bills, legislation or anything of the sort. It is just because their system is not fully automated, so whenever a new user registers, a person in the other end gets an email end manually has to enter the data in another system (SAP), before the user gets activated.

Interestingly enough, the University of Waterloo runs its co-op program through a website called Jobmine which allows students to search through job postings which they might be eligible for. Coincidently, it is also only available until midnight on weekdays and just recently started being available 24 hours on weekends.

Might be there is some civil servant who's computer doubles as a webserver. When he leaves at 5pm, down goes the server.

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