What if your website had business hours? (2022)

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Article page usability issue

  • Multiple commenters on iPhone and desktop Safari/Chrome report the blog post itself is hard or impossible to scroll due to “sticky” snapping to the top.
  • Workarounds mentioned: reader mode, rotating to landscape, scrolling in screen margins.
  • Despite the bug, several readers say they liked the article and references.

Examples of “websites with business hours”

  • E‑commerce: B&H’s site is closed for Sabbath and some holidays; some see this as off‑putting and churn‑inducing, others say they happily return because of strong trust, service, and prices.
  • Government/education: IRS Employer ID site, unemployment systems, municipal utilities, property tax portals, community college registration, unemployment websites, DMV/DVLA‑style services, Brazil’s “virtual queues,” and various national tax/banking systems (e.g., Germany, Canada, Japan, India) have fixed hours or nightly downtime.
  • Other services: Steam weekly maintenance, Lotto NZ, airline/travel industry portals, fanfic sites with restricted hours for mature content, some Japanese banking/municipal and JR Pass sites, Bolivian and Japanese government systems, etc.

Business trade‑offs: quality, loyalty, and signaling

  • One camp calls closing an online store “ridiculous” and non‑competitive; they expect sites to run unmonitored while staff work normal hours.
  • Others argue that great service and ethics can outweigh inconvenience; closures can be a credible signal of values and long‑term orientation rather than profit maximization.
  • Some prefer a high‑quality service with reasonable limits over “always on” services that cut corners.
  • However, commenters warn that arbitrary closures (e.g., college registration, airline agent portals) feel hostile and can permanently push users elsewhere when alternatives exist.

Operations, maintenance, and legacy systems

  • Some downtime is driven by old batch‑processing backends that assume nighttime maintenance windows, with modern front‑ends simply inheriting those constraints.
  • Commenters argue for zero‑downtime deployments, rolling updates, and planned, well‑messaged maintenance instead of opaque outages.
  • Queuing systems (government, games) are seen as a way to throttle load, sometimes intentionally mimicking physical line‑waiting.

Human factors, on‑call stress, and expectations

  • Several posts criticize 24/7 expectations for non‑critical systems, calling perpetual on‑call a health hazard.
  • Others counter that certain deadlines (e.g., tax filing) justify short periods of true 24/7 readiness, given customer stress and financial stakes.
  • One person experimentally “closes” their email server at night with temporary SMTP errors to:
    • Enforce personal boundaries.
    • Test other servers’ retry behavior.
    • Challenge assumptions about always‑on digital services.

Time zones, access, and fairness

  • Fixed “business hours” online often ignore global audiences and night‑owls; what’s 3 a.m. for one user is mid‑afternoon for another.
  • B2B sites may effectively have “soft hours” by scheduling big deploys when analytics show minimal use, reducing off‑hours work without blocking access.
  • Some fear a world where “night people” find both offline and online services systematically unavailable.