Heartburn: Hints on Dealing

Some managed hosting providers boast of their ability to provide automatic software patching inclusive of the server management services they provide. Clients do like this concept: all they have to do is rely on their service provider to do all the dirty work.

But behind the scenes, it becomes important to consider just how the automated patches are applied. Some managed hosting companies like to use the yum update feature. Granted this is an efficient method of patching. However, let's consider a case study:

An intense database/feed driven website that used basic PHP and MySQL as the underlying engine. The lacky at the managed hosting company on patching night thought "easy I'll use yum update". Little did he consider that PHP 4 and MySQL 4 have significant issues that need to be planned before updating these. When PHP was automatically upgraded to v5, the register_globals behaviour was altered breaking significant parts of the code. Additionally the my.cnf file was overwritten with a default configuration that bound the MySQL service to a different port breaking connection from the PHP pages.

Hosting providers operators need to have a defined change management process. Whilst these problems were easily corrected once identified, it was a nuisance for the client to suffer the heartburn knowing their web business was offline all night. Be sure to ask your managed hosting provider how they apply patches and what preventative measures they take before doing so.

Critical Ops as a managed hosting provider has the complete facility to snapshot a hosting environment before applying patches and rollback should the patch not be successful.

Critical Ops is Australia's leading managed hosting and SaaS applications provider. The company is committed to education and information sharing and maintains knowledge base for providers and consumers.