How to publish or deploy .NET website without delays

Question

How to publish or deploy .NET website without delays?

I have look for websites that are build over .NET technologies, like StackOverflow, and I never saw them down because an update is being made. For my web sites, I got down time in minors updates, like correcting some bugs on my Controllers (I use MVC), not by doing something bigger like database or server movements.

So how can I prevent site loading delays due to ASP.NET Startup? I know that it require "ASP.NET worker process" to compile the code, but how can I prevent the traffic issues.

Answer 1

The typical way of doing this is creating a farm of multiple web servers and, when you want to update the site, take each server offline and update them one at a time. Investigate How to create an ASP.NET web farm?.

Answer 2

It's all about the server setup. Most companies have at least 2-3 server: 2 Frontend servers and a backend server. Then you can take one of the frontend servers down, point all traffic to the other one, upgrade the server which is down, and then take that server up, and continue the process with the other.

In some cases you would use load balancing to make sure the two servers are synchronized.

You will notice that sometimes you cannot post here on Stackoverflow because of updates. That's because the database is a shared server, which "can be down", if you need an upgrade. Yes, there are also options against this, but it can gives problems if everyone writes to the database while the site is up, hence the "readonly mode" from time to time.