I have exchanged several e-mails & support tickets with one of my current hosting providers. The original complaint was that they were very slow to implement patches & fixes for software on their servers. Mainly Apache & php.

I first looked into shared hosting due to the following two reasons:
1) I didn't have the time to manage it myself.
2) Bandwidth is expensive if you have to pay for it all by yourself.

I understand the WHT motto "You get what you pay for."

But honestly, how long should a customer wait while their hosting company twiddles their thumbs at service patches? Isn't it their job to worry about this stuff and not mine??

This is a snippet of one of my conversations:

HOST: "We can only upgrade the enviroment when Ensim provides the updated software. Ensim is currently working on a new version this will correct the php issue and offer other enhancements. We currently don't have a definite date when the software will be released."

ME: "It seems Ensim does have a fix for this http://www.ensim.com/support/wpls/downloads/wp30php.shtml and is stated as being "Required". This php patch has been out since early March and I was VERY surprised to see that ***** has not applied this patch. I am assuming that the other patches listed on Ensim's support site http://www.ensim.com/support/wpls/index.html are probably not installed either."

HOST: "As an option, you can request to be moved to our data center in IL which doesn't use the Ensim enviroment but has php 4.12 installed. Please contact the Sales Department for details.


!! -- !! just how anal am I being by suggesting that they keep their servers in order? I'm currently STILL running on apache 1.3.19 w/ PHP 4.0.6

Thanks for the feedback!

So, I take it no one on this board has any comments on their hosting provider's upgrade/patch policy? Or have most people come to grips with the fact that they can't do anything about it anyway except keep looking for another host?

I've never had problems with it in the past. When I was looking for a new host, I found a cheaper one with better support, more options and they upgraded the versions very quickly too (PHP, Apache..).

I have to say I was looking for a host which would have the latest versions in my latest search though, because I needed it for a new project. Very happy since I joined this host (last March).

hobzilla, seeing as how your host is ***'ed out, I would say they do not have a good reputation here.
No, you are not being anal about what you would like your files to be served with, and this should be a good indication of what your future with this host is likely to be like.
Start searching for a new host before something worse (than not upgrading properly or in a timely manner) happens.