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Ask Slashdot: Should Hosting Companies Have Change Freezes?

Posted by Soulskill on from the what-about-change-burns dept.

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?"

4 of 138 comments (clear)

  1. windows? what were you thinking? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

  2. change freeze by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    I work for a company with 1200+ VMs and the change freeze concept is nothing new. For us, it's only 1 month around new years and mainly due to staffing issues if something goes wrong.

  3. It's not that bad by bigtrike · · Score: 5, Funny

    The server will be spending 50% of its life rebooting to apply minor updates and install software, reducing the risk of a security breach.

  4. 216.34.181.45 by kf6auf · · Score: 5, Funny

    Whatever you do, don't take down 216.34.181.45.