I’ve been a part of some late night release procedures and they’re never fun. You’ve got QA, Dev, IT and a handful of managers sitting in their jammies in a group IM (or worse, a conference call) from 2:00 AM until way too early in the morning. Everyone’s grumpy and sleepy, causing the release to be more difficult and take longer. Sometimes the dreaded “rollback!” is yelled. All this because you’re running a high profile website that needs to be accessible 24/7, and 2:00 AM - 5:00 AM downtime is better than daytime downtime. If you're a site that doesn't have 10s of thousands to drop on a real http load balancer, use this strategy to release software during business hours with no downtime using apache's mod_proxy_balancer....