[nickjackson]

I really don't think there is any excuse for it this day and age especially when building sites from scratch. There are so many different techniques and technologies for doing zero downtime deploys, not to mention the numerous PaaS that will do it out of the box if you dont know how.

[viraptor]

There's still cost to it. It basically boils down to: do you lose more money during a manual maintenance period, or by hiring extra people to do all changes in zero-downtime style. (Or doing slower development with the existing team) The technology for transparent changes has been available for decades, although it's true - it's much easier to use today. But it still needs extra work. And someone has to pay for that work in the end.