Server Shutdown Affecting eCommerce Site?

User Question: I have an eCommerce site and need to shutdown the server for about 10 minutes for maintenance. Will this affect the website's Google ranking?

Answer:

Shutting down the server for couple minutes is no problem. Google understands that websites need maintenance and could have temporary outages. So as long as the time is not too long, it is fine and won't affect SEO or anything. But in a perfect world, the website should always be up and running. This is good for the customers/users anyway.

In my case, I don't ever shutdown the website unless there are some extreme situations such as hardware issues. Deployments are done with hot-swap so new code is deployed while the site is running.