

This Website Only Open During Business Hours - a5seo
http://www.freakonomics.com/2012/08/20/this-website-only-open-during-business-hours/

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jrockway
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.

~~~
mnutt
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.

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jrockway
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."

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sharingancoder
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)

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jrockway
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.

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extension
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.

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adrianhoward
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.

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ams6110
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).

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qq66
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.

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petercooper
_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..

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trhtrsh
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...](http://kosherdev.com/2009/11/wordpress-plugin-to-lock-site-for-
shabat/)

~~~
tedunangst
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...](http://www.bhphotovideo.com/find/HelpCenter/HoursOfOperation.jsp)

~~~
stan_rogers
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).

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jvdongen
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.

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tonyedgecombe
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.

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lreeves
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.

~~~
mthoms
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.

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devolve
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.

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stripe
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

:)

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brudgers
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.

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damncabbage
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.)

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nabilt
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.

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maratd
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.

~~~
MortenK
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.

~~~
freehunter
Especially considering electricity costs less at night.

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huskyr
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!

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MortenK
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.

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addies
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.

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

