Thank you Oskar and others for replying and giving us all a better understanding of how restarts are being handled. It was really nice to hear this matter is of concern, beingst most of Asia COULD be affected by it if were were part of the 'peak' time. Knowing that the restart times will happen at a certain...and I reiterate...certain time, really helps. If these times occur regularly then we can plan accordingly. It would be even better if those times could be more precise rather than "starting at 5am" and then 90 minutes later the sim is restarted. To me that means we are down for about 2 hours. Nothing can be planned during that time. I do realize it is difficult to execute server batch restarts.
As for moving our sim to a beta server. $300 dollars a month to host a not-for-profit community is extremely steep. Even $125 a month is difficult for a community under 1,000 people. We're growing and truly hope to be able to afford an island sim, but that just isn't possible at the moment for us. Nice to know the info though, thanks.
May I suggest one idea that could help, if sims were offered an option int he region/estate settings to choose their peak usage time, then the server restart team could query blocks of servers according to the their average peak times. For example, In the Estae/Regions setting I would choose "Japan" from a drop down under Peak Usage Timezone. Does this make sense?
Thanks for the reponses and all the best. Time to go change our calendar. :-)