Recently one of the clients I work on had a major launch. This was a project months in the making and is making a major difference in their customer behavior. What I found disturbing was the fact that they launched it at noon mid-week. One of the things to consider when launching any update it when your customers are most active with the site.
If the proverbial “shit hits the fan” you want to interrupt as few people as possible, so try to plan your launches for late at night or very early in the morning, when traffic is low. Also it goes without saying thay you should always have a back-up ready to deploy at a moments notice. And if you don’t have a back-up, well, then you better be the best programmer on the planet because otherwise you are screwed.
One of the websites I worked on in the part consisted of two identical servers. One was called “staging” and one was called “live” the servers would copy over any new files at regular intervals, usually on the hour. This meant you could make sure everything was working prior to hitting live. The down side with this approach was you were scrambling to get the files in place prior to the copy time. If you only got half the files in place, you had to wait another hour to fix it.
There is a very simple rule in launching anything. Nothing launches Friday afternoon. Period. There is nothing worse than having a launch at 5pm on a Friday and having it go haywire. Your friday night is ruined, your weekend is ruined and the following week is ruined because you didn’t get a weekend.
Also, launches should not be just FTPing files onto a server. This is because ftping takes time, and customers interacting with the site will get half an old page and half a new page if they should happen to be watching at that specific moment.
The best way to launch a change is to copy the files to the server first, but in a different location. They should have the same folder stucture as the live site. Then copy the files into place. This is because folder to folder copying is much faster than ftping files so anyone requesting a page should either see an older version or the new version, no hybrid pages.
If it is done when traffic is low then you minimize the risk of thinks screwing up and give yourself time to fix anything that does.
Happy Launching!