What if your website had business hours? (2022)

In "Being on-call sucks", I wrote about how having an on-call person or rotation is required for any software service running 24/7. While reviewing the draft, my friend Michael L. pointed out that while most websites are up all the time, some are not - for example, B&H Photo doesn't accept orders on Saturdays for religious reasons. So what if our software business had limited hours instead, like a physical-world store? In e-commerce, people like to estimate the cost of an outage by dividing revenue of a time period by the duration of the outage. For example, Gremlin claims that Amazon would lose over $200,000 for every minute of downtime, by dividing annual revenue by the number of minutes in a year. But this is an overestimate - it's not like every single customer in that minute instantly abandoned their cart and churned. Do would-be B&H buyers see the store is closed for the Sabbath and go somewhere else for their purchase? Probably a few of them do. But surely some of them also ret ... Read full article.