Rebooting a live web server

Question

We have a website sitting on a single webserver and we need to upgrade .net and MVC so will require a reboot. What is the best way to handle the 5 minutes or so of downtime?

I'm thinking we could reduce the TTL on the domain to, say, 1 second. Change the DNS to point to another server showing an 'under maintenance' type page. Then reboot then point the DNS back at it.

Is this the general preferred method? We don't have any load balancing to swith it somewhere else or anything.

Answer 1

First off as @David Jashi said, do it at night. but more specifically do it at a non-peak time.

Will you have any roll-back in place just in case it does not come back up?

You could use the second server as a carbon copy then do the upgrade on the non-live server, test it and then swap the DNS records, this will provide no down-time what so ever.

Answer 2

That sounds about right. You should do it during offpeak hours for your domain, just in case you have unexpected trouble making the switch. Also be prepared for the unexpected when rebooting the server. This is the only time we see startup problems in software (obviously) and some hardware problems only show themselves during startup as well. Probably won't happen, but better safe then sorry.

I prefer to swap to another server , even if it's only an older, slower model. Usually it's set up beside the main server and the forwarding on the router changed to it. This way the site remains up the entire time.