I recently responded to a member complaint about LOTW not working last Sunday. I learned from a post by Bob Vallio that LOTW was apparently down for scheduled maintenance, and included this information in my response. The scheduled maintenance notification was apparently posted or E-mailed somewhere. 

If users knew that the system was down for scheduled maintenance, I suspect they would be less likely to complain.

1) I don't know what users see on their computer screens during these down periods, but suggest that somehow they be alerted to what is happening as they attempt to access LOTW, instead of expecting them to search the ARRL web-site or be subscribed to alert E-mails to find notices.

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Also, sites like Google seem never to be down for scheduled maintenance. I am not certain of the actual  computer configuration used for LOTW, nor am I knowledgeable about exactly what was being maintained, hardware, software, or both. LOTW was scheduled to be down for 12 hours, and consequently assume software was changed and tested.

Has there ever been consideration of having two computers run LOTW somewhat in parallel, so that if something is being maintained on one, the other just keeps running, and at least stores new user input data so that when the other comes back up, it will update properly? The price of quite powerful computers and even terabyte drives is reasonably inexpensive. There would be some cost to configure and program this.

2) Is it reasonable to provide no-scheduled-maintenance-downtime capability? 

73,

Dick Norton, N6AA