During updates, my forum sometimes experiences a brief period of downtime. The site was unavailable for a short time while the update was running. Since I update my forum frequently, sometimes daily. I’m concerned that it could negatively affect SEO and user experience. Can we fix this from occuring? I have 3vcores 4.2ghz. 8gb ram. Low traffic. I’ve rebuilt my forum multiple times and even reinstalled it multiple times.
AI-generated summary
Cate_Soule is concerned about downtime during frequent updates to their Discourse forum, fearing negative impacts on SEO and user experience, especially after a previous site was delisted by Google due to prolonged outages. tobiaseigen reassures that downtime is typically brief and unavoidable due to container restarts, even when updating via the admin dashboard. They suggest using a 503 status during rebuilds and advise against showing a maintenance page, as it’s not recommended. Cate_Soule explains they update daily due to frequent updates and a slow previous server, but now only experience occasional issues. tobiaseigen questions the frequency of updates and the extent of past downtime. Ed_S recommends updating less frequently, suggesting waiting a day after releases to avoid potential bugs.
Hi Cate! This is a normal part of updating and is quite short. I honestly wouldn’t worry too much about SEO, but you could let your members know that you update frequently so they know to just check back later if the site appears to go down for a few minutes while you are updating.
Also, if you update from the UI the site will remain mostly available during the update.
There is a trick to show an “under maintenance” page while updating but I don’t recommend it.
But I was updating through the admin dashboard. I use 503 http during rebuild. My previous site was delisted in Google due to multiple downtimes so I had to change domain.
Well, I did say “mostly”! 
It’s not possible to avoid the downtime entirely because the container has to be restarted during the update. But in my experience the downtime is never more than a minute or so.
I update daily myself but my sites are quite small and I am obsessive about seeing the latest changes. Nobody has ever complained to me about the downtime.
I am curious..why are you updating daily?
What does this mean?
That really surprises me! How much downtime did you have and for how long?
I am out of my depth talking about google. I don’t worry about it for my sites (they are small and private). Also, google is such a black box! It can be hard to know why things happen there.
I use 503 response (instead of 502 error) during maintenance mode like rebuilds (only when Discourse requires me to). My previous server was slow, so sometimes updates took longer and the site stayed too long during updates. So I got delisted. Now my new server is overkill, so I only have issues like this occasionally during update.
There are new updates every day, every hour so I update whenever I see new updates.
(Sorry, this is unsolicited advice and doesn’t answer your question… I’d suggest updating less often - not only will you have less of the unavoidable downtime, you’ll be less likely to update at a time when things are a bit broken. Personally I update when releases come out, but I also wait a day or so to give a chance for breakages to be fixed.)