Originally Posted by Marcus

I have a site with a good amount of users on it.

Everyday when my site does a backup it creates a dump of the database. It takes about a minute to dump that database, so the tables can not be written to for that time.

It bothers me when this happens because the site is down for 30-60 seconds.
My members think my site sucks, tell each other it sucks, and they leave to go to my competitors. It happens everyday. That's bad for my business.

Is this lock normal? Or can something be done about it?
My competitors sites are much bigger than mine and I dont see them crash. So I dont understand how they do it.