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Reasons For Existence Of The Maintenance Mode  

  • The core reason is that it’s a part of the hierarchy for updating the core, modules, and themes of a particular website (when in need).

  • This provides a way to stop the end-users from accessing an undesirable user-experience while allowing developers, administrators, and designers to access the site.

  • This particular model of Drupal makes an absolute sense as even preventing users from accessing a broken website, while it gets updated, definitely is better than allowing the users to get odd experiences at the end. As it's truly said,” something is always better than nothing.” (it's possibly one of the best ways possible).

Is This Maintenance Mode Always Needed?

Precisely based on the experiences on Drupal web-development services, it's (the maintenance-mode) considered as a right helping hand and below are some of the core-aspects to be jotted for the same;

  • One can't directly assume that a deployment, which is working in a testing/staging environment, is going to work the same in a live or production environment.

  • Deploying codes and database changes without the maintenance page result in data loss and which can't be taken as an acceptable-result.

  • Keeping in mind the above-stated aspects, here comes the game of reducing the downtime, i.e. code changes generally take a minute for reimbursement while database changes take several minutes for the same. So here the need of an expert-coder and developer should be faded-up.

  • Considering the above-elaborated points comes to the need for a safe environment that won't be having any data-loss and will also provide the optimal user experience.

How to Provide a Safe Environment For Deploying Updates?   

  • Relying on the common-grounds, most of the enterprise-sites are heavily cached by Reverse Proxy. So whenever changes are deployed on the sites, the reverse proxy aspect continues to serve those cached pages.

  • There are many cases in which the site resembles fine & working for the end-users until they click and ask for or say the request for cached pages, as soon as they ask for it, the maintenance page appears in the front-end.

  • This approach of relying on cached pages at the time of deploying changes stands as one of the best solutions for most Drupal hosting providers.

  • Serving a cached site to the end-users results in providing “Read-only” user-experience, except some pages will end with the maintenance page at the end…

What Exactly is Read-only Mode?

As the Drupal Community says, “There is always a module for that.”, Sharique Farooqui (Sharique) has precisely crafted a Read-only Mode module on Drupal, which stands as one of the finest alternatives to the built-in Maintenance Mode in Drupal. In this mode, forms are replaced with the message mentioned below:

The site is currently in maintenance. During this maintenance, it is not possible to change site content (like comments, pages, and users).

A read-only Drupal instance basically should…

  • Allow the users to access the content (they need). 

  • Disable content editing, comments, and webform submission (and all such different communicating/processing aspects).

  • Display custom messages when a user can't create or update the content.

How can a site Easily & Safely be Switched to Read-only Mode?

Below is the step-by-step elaboration of the steps to be followed for switching to Read-only Mode while making changes on codes and database for Drupal sites:

  1. A dedicated read-only copy of a production Drupal site is set up. The “read-only” site needs to be configured (on continual-basis) always to enable the Read-only mode module.

  1. The read-only Drupal site is synced with production nightly or manually. The read-only site must never be synced during a process of ongoing-deployment.

  1. A health check script is set up on the production site, which returns FALSE when a website is switched to maintenance mode.

  1. When the production site is switched to maintenance mode, the load balancer, using the health check, should direct all traffic to the read-only site.

  1. Once the production site switches off maintenance mode, the load balancer should now direct all traffic back to the production site.

Some Downsides of Read-only Mode:

  • A load-balanced Read-only server doesn't stay as a perfect solution as the end-users will still not be able to submit certain forms and comments (which turns out to be a broken digital-experience).

  • Adding another server to a load-balanced hosting environment increases infrastructure costs.

  • Fortunately, the read-only server is not used frequently and by being read-only, requires less computational resources.

There you go with some sense of how to deploy changes on Drupal sites with minimal downtime possible, but as we always say, investments in different companies or say different platforms for all your tech-cravings are always subjected to market risks, choose wisely & live happily. Cheers!

Concluding-essence:

AddWeb can be considered as the one who quickly adapts the latest trends and technology with Drupal development to provide a complete satisfactory web design service solution to their clients. Being a dominated Website Design and Development Company, Our progress continually remains smooth and that we assure our clients with the booming completion of their projects inside the stipulated time-frame. Reliableness, timeliness and skilled approach area unit mantra of our triumph in the realm.

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