Ask Slashdot: Should Hosting Companies Have Change Freezes?

AngryDad writes "Today I received a baffling email from my hosting provider that said, 'We have a company-wide patching freeze and we will not be releasing patches to our customers who utilize the patching portal for the months of November and December.' This means that myself and all other customers of theirs who run Windows servers will have to live with several critical holes for at least two months. Is this common practice with mid-tier hosting providers? If so, may I ask Eastern-EU folks to please refrain from hacking my servers during the holiday season?"

Comments

windows? what were you thinking?

[Anonymous Coward]

Using windows to provide an internet facing service was the first mistake.

Re:windows? what were you thinking?

[gavron]

What he said.

I'm sorry the Windows-mods modded it down. It's instructional and it's informational. NOBODY should EVER use windows servers as Internet-facing devices.

Sorry, mods. Reality suggests the 0 is your score for having a clue.

E

Re:windows? what were you thinking?

[dbIII]

Since in this case you can patch without reboots, the answer is just switching to linux (or anything else that can patch without reboots) CAN solve the problem.
Of course it doesn't solve every server problem, but nobody above said it would, just you dishonestly shifting the goalposts and pretending it's no good unless it fixes problems that were not even being discussed here. That's a bit of a slimy little tactic IMHO so you must feel very strongly if you are prepared to lower yourself to that level, but let's keep all the mindless emotive fanboy bullshit out of it since it just makes you look like more of an idiot than you actually are.

Better safe than sorry.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is for automated patching, you may certainly request to be patched by the support teams. Typically these two months are the busiest for online shopping sites and a botched patch could cost the business tons of money. Since you know your business the best, you make the call. Better safe than sorry in my opinion.

What does your contract say?

[HaeMaker]

Two months is a looong time. 17% of the year not getting full fidelity on your contracted services seems excessive. Usually, changes freezes are a few hours in the middle of the night, once a week.

Not hosting

[LordLucless]

You didn't get this email from your hosting company. You got it from the company managing your servers. The fact that it's the same company is largely irrelevant.

If the server management company isn't flexible enough to meet your needs, do it yourself. You keep track of the patches, you decide when they're ready for release, you release them, you test them. If you don't have the skills for that, or the money to hire someone with the skills, then get another company to do it. If you're using a dedicated server, there's nothing stopping you giving someone else the access to manage and patch it.

If you yourself don't have root/Administrator access, then you don't have a server; you have access to a server. Fork out a little bit extra, and get a dedicated box that you control.