... upgraded cPanel, resetting a bunch of settings on all of your resold domains?

What if this was a KNOWN side-effect of cPanel, yet they do it anyways?

What if they didn't notify you of the upgrade, so you and all of your resold domains are now scrambling to restore a bunch of setting that you might or might not remember?

What are YOU supposed to do as a customer? Use up 50-75% of your own web space on frequent backups, just on the off chance that your host gets a wild hair up their @$$ and decides to start upgrading things? Eat up a chunk of your bandwidth downloading such backups on a daily/weekly basis ... assuming you have a broadband connection at home and that is feasible?

*sigh* I swear I can't go more than 12 months without a host doing something totally amateurish like this, causing me a ton of work recovering or moving elsewhere. Do *any* reseller hosts give a rats @$$ about things of this nature, or do they all really not care, and they point the finger of blame against the customer for not doing their job of backing things up or at least performing upgrades in a responsible manner?

Backing up content of a site is one thing. Backing up every aspect of a site and its configuration, with all of the cPanel applets, times 20 - 30 - 50 sites is another. Hell, if I wanted to invest the time and energy into becoming an expert in all of this, I wouldn't be paying someone else to do it.

It's your host responsibility to do the updates. Would you prefer your server was insecure? If I had a reseller account I would be more concerned that they hadn't done the updates.

Most hosting panel updates do cause "minor" problems but most hosts are happy assist in correcting these issues.

Here's a thought, how about doing the upgrade without smoking all the configuration files? I know that must seems really weird, eh? Or how about at least making the backed up configuration files available to the accounts without having to jump through hoops and begging tech support to get their act together, a week after the upgrade?

I never said I would prefer a less secure server - that is a ludicrus reply to my question. If you know an update is going to mess something up, how about you take the time to prepare to recover from that problem to begin with or look for a way around it, instead of letting customers find out about it from THEIR resold domains/customers? Is it a mystery that these upgrades break things? I love your mentality that it is OK to break these things, and fix them later if someone complains loud enough.

Typical reply from a host - hide, deny, make excuses and draw silly "would you rather" situations.

Is it really impossible to backup a tree's watever.conf files and restore them after the cPanel upgrade in a Linux environment?

>> Most hosting panel updates do cause "minor" problems but most hosts are happy assist in correcting these issues.

Only happy after you bitch and complain I guess, and not that happy to help. If they were happy to help, they could invest a fraction of that effort ahead of time to let their customer know what is going on, instead of us finding out after the fact, when things are broken and customers are unhappy. Oh wait, the secure server excuse. Have fun with your secure server that is empty because your customers have left.

I can't even respond to someone with such a poor attitude and misguided view of web hosts.

Originally posted by mgphoto
I can't even respond to someone with such a poor attitude and misguided view of web hosts.

You just did!

You're right there. (1) there isn't much for you to reply to and (2) I was looking for the opinion of fellow reseller customers - not a host who is only looking at it from one angle. Especially not a host who thinks that an upgrade that knowingly breaks functionality is acceptable, and that it is acceptable to allow the breaking to go unnoticed until the customer finally finds out and complains about it. I've only been using web hosts since 1994, so there is no way I have anything useful to add.

Are Plesk or Ensim known for acting this way also?
I've used Plesk only briefly and easily prefer it to cPanel.

I think cPanel itself should do a lot of things better than it does. Upgrading should not change a feature's configuration unless said feature has been drastically changed or removed.

My opinion is likely skewed though if for no other reason than I am just not a cPanel fan. The Exim mail server plays a big part in that. Maybe its just bad luck, but when a mail server spontaneously starts blackholing defined addresses, it makes me appreciate qmail that much more.

I digress...

My point is: I'm usually quicker to blame cPanel directly for such problems than the host.

I hear ya seadawg. I like cPanel, but I didn't realize that this was a concern. I guess I'm most upset that the host either was not aware of this or they did not care. In either case, to best serve their customers, how could they not warn us ahead of time or be prepared to remedy the problems when customers come complaining?

After researching, I'm guessing that this latest cPanel upgrade also upgraded spamassassin, and it was that process that likely killed the old .conf file. Sure, the SA might have necessitated a new .conf file and a new format.

No matter what the issue, problem or excuse - I do not agree that it is acceptable for the host to not be prepared to restore full functionality or at the very least be prepared to help. Not a week later when the problem has snowballed into a mess. If they are going to provide a service, shouldn't they be equipped to do so? Especially when their claim to fame is a "Astonishing Support guarantee!"

I might feel different if this was a couple of my own domains on a shared account, but this is a reseller account, where it is assumed people are reselling servcies to paying customers. It isn't as simple as turning spamassassin back on for everyone, they all have access to modify and tweak settings, something that I acutally recommend instead of going with the sometimes awkward default settings.

I would definitely expect, and be happy with, a "heads up" that cPanel is being upgraded and may overwrite some configurations.
I don't think a week's notice would be unreasonable. My current host gave a week's notice that the server may be inaccessible for up to 30 minutes between 4am and 7am for a router upgrade.

I don't think I would expect them to fix all the little issues that come up, but upgrade issues should be documented on cPanel's site so they can at least warn you what to be ready for. At least you wouldn't be caught off-guard, and could even pass the warning on to your own customers to cut down on angry emails.

Yes, Plesk and Ensim and all the others do the same thing from time to time.

My point is a host can not know how a specific script will be affected by an upgrade but it is the hosts responsibility to keep their servers up to date.

How many 1,000s or 10,000s of files are there on servers that may be affected by an update. How many home made scripts are on the server? How many scripts that are so badly written that it's a miracle they work at all. There is no way for any host in the world to test for this.

I guess I'm going to have to tone down my expectations a bit. I know I have a number of "customers" that have extensive whitelistings that ensure that *their* customer e-mails get through ... these are lists that they slowly add to over time and they can't just recreate at a moment's notice. My host is really avoiding doing a restore from 8 days ago, so I may be out of luck there.

Thanks for the comments seadawg.

>> My point is a host can not know how a specific script will be affected by an upgrade but it is the hosts responsibility to keep their servers up to date.

Wow, and I thought a host was responsible for so much more. We're not talking about what you describe, we're talking about a cPanel/SA upgrade that (I have finally found) *KNOWINGLY* smokes the .conf files. If it isn't the hosts responsibility to care about that, I don't know whos it is.

Originally posted by mgphoto
My point is a host can not know how a specific script will be affected by an upgrade but it is the hosts responsibility to keep their servers up to date.

mgphoto, I don't think it is unreasonable to expect a heads up, even if specific issues are not known.
As far as I'm concerned, it is cPanel's responsibility to document upgrade issues (not sure if they do this or not), but it would benefit resellers greatly to know when to check for problems, before the swarm of email hits.

I agree that the host does need to keep things up to date, but it can't hurt to send out an email a week beforehand.

I think it is important to add, not all updates are security updates. Some are for functionality, and there is no need to run out and always upgrade to the latest if it isn't a security risk.

I guess I'm more used to a corporate environment where everything is tested before it is just thrown on a server. We have 400ish hardware servers at work with many more virtual servers, and guess what - we test before we implement, even security patches. If you cannot test for something, guess what? You better have a rollback plan in your pocket.

Totally.
I wouldn't expect web hosts to have a test environment set aside for testing patches, but measures should be taken to insure that things don't get bunged up too badly.
Even on my home fileserver, I keep an empty partition large enough to take a snapshot of my system partition before an upgrade. So, worst case, if the upgrade really screws things up, I can just boot to the snapshot partition and the system and snapshot partitions just trade places :)

Granted, most problems can be ironed out without throwing out the whole patch, but its always a good safety net in a business where uptime is king.

Well, the issue is over.

My host does not keep backups for more than a day or two. The upgrade that took place in the early morning of October 3rd overwrote files that I will never have access to again. The last (and only!) backup my host has access to it the one from 36 hours ago.

Someone really needs to learn about incremential/differential backups.

:uhh: :angry: