A a software-as-a-service provider, Socrata upgrades our platform code on a regular basis (often daily) and this process is designed to be transparent to our users and customers - in nearly all cases there is no downtime for our deployments.  Our ability to frequently deploy our code is a huge benefit for our customers as it allows us to respond quickly and deploy small updates with great frequency and continually improve our platform. 

We also have a once a month 1-hour maintenance window when there may be downtime on the system.  We reserve the hour, although often times there is as little as 5 minutes of actual downtime.  A warning window will appear on all Socrata sites wel in advance of this downtime, which is always scheduled on the weekend to cause the least amount of disruption to our customers.   For more details see this article:

We review the most interesting and useful feature releases at our monthly customer webinars, and will soon be releasing a monthly customer newsletter with similar information.