How to handle web server downtime?

[MichaelWeisbaum]

We have a client who is taking their web server down Saturday morning from 1am - 7am for planned maintenance. Initially, we thought to have all requests return a 503 (service unavailable) response but the web server itself will be down so we are not able to have it return any response codes. Updating the DNS on the registrar will have too much lag time while it propogates out so we aren't sure exactly how to handle this. I had thought possibly of using a second DNS, or a service like DynDNS but that seems like a large amount of effort to set up just for some planned downtime. I have to imagine that Google understands planned website/server downtime every once in a great while.

This client has pretty good rankings for some incredibly competitive terms so we want to do all that we can to make sure those rankings are preserved. What are some other potential solutions? We could totally just be overthinking this but we'd rather be safe than sorry...

Thanks in advance!

[NakulGoyal]

Yes, I would not worry about it. Google understands these issues specially on large scale websites. I have worked in scenarios where there's a weekly rebuild or deployment which essentially means the site is down for 2-6 hrs. Nothing happens. In a rare occasion, if your page with the maintenance message gets cached, you can always request a re-crawl of upto 50 pages from your Google Webmaster Console. I have never had to do that.

[KeriMorgret]

We had an excellent post about that from a YouMoz author in January. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-handle-downtime-during-site-maintenance should tell you everything you need to know!