Send us a simple email?

[conceptskateboarding]

Hello,

I'm a HostGator reseller and have been 95% happy with the service. This morning I woke up to a few support tickets from customers saying cPanel doesn't show up properly and their website won't load.

So I contacted support only to find out you were updating cPanel and this affected the cPanel layout and redirects. Don't get me wrong I am happy you are updating cPanel but I do have one suggestion.

I know you have an RSS feed. I took a look and couldn’t find any announcement for cPanel updates. I also read in a forum post that you send email notifications. I also did not receive them.

LET YOUR RESELLERS KNOW! Is there anything wrong with sending your resellers a simple email? All you will need to say is when you are performing updates and what affects it will have on our customer’s accounts. If you sent me an email a couple of days ago I could let my customers know about the updates before it happens!

Thanks

[Pitrow]

This has been one of my biggest peeves since joining HG. Especially for resellers who have their own customers to support there needs to be ADVANCED notification of anything that will effect our customers so we can let them know and be prepared.

[conceptskateboarding]

Originally Posted by Pitrow

This has been one of my biggest peeves since joining HG. Especially for resellers who have their own customers to support there needs to be ADVANCED notification of anything that will effect our customers so we can let them know and be prepared.

I completely agree with you Pitrow.

There is nothing worse than this. In fact it's getting to the point where I am thinking about moving hosts. I'm sure the cPanel upgrade has been planned for days so why not send us an email perhaps 24 hours before you make the upgrade?

Your resellers work very hard trying to build a professional web hosting company much like your own. Don't we deserve to be informed about any changes that will affect our customer’s experience??

Why not create a opt in form where resellers who want to receive email updates can?

[GatorJacob]

Hi everyone!

I apologize for the inconveniences and the frustrations. Unfortunately we were not planning this, nor were we aware that cPanel was pushing an update last night. In fact, we were not aware of the issues you speak of until customers started advising us of issues on our servers. We started checking our servers, and saw that cPanel updates were running, and the new 11.25 version was being installed. We've been very busy all morning dealing with these issues, and hopefully we can update our cPanel versions on our servers to 11.25 tonight or later this week.

In the past, cPanel has been really good with testing their releases, and making sure that the releases were good to go, however with this release they were not. cPanel has re-released their 11.25 upgrade (a few hours ago), which fixed alot of the earlier problems that everyone was having. We only have our servers to upcp (upgrade cPanel) every night around midnight - 3 am, therefore the newest updates won't be on our servers yet. We've also downgraded cPanel to the stable version of 11.24 on our shared and reseller servers, so there shouldn't be anymore issues.

If you are still having issues, please email support@hostgator.com and we'll be able to take a look and get these fixed. We are still working through all the issues caused by this updates, so support might be a little slower today than usual.

As always, thanks for your patience and understanding!

[conceptskateboarding]

Originally Posted by GatorJacob

Hi everyone!

I apologize for the inconveniences and the frustrations. Unfortunately we were not planning this, nor were we aware that cPanel was pushing an update last night. In fact, we were not aware of the issues you speak of until customers started advising us of issues on our servers. We started checking our servers, and saw that cPanel updates were running, and the new 11.25 version was being installed. We've been very busy all morning dealing with these issues, and hopefully we can update our cPanel versions on our servers to 11.25 tonight or later this week.

In the past, cPanel has been really good with testing their releases, and making sure that the releases were good to go, however with this release they were not. cPanel has re-released their 11.25 upgrade (a few hours ago), which fixed alot of the earlier problems that everyone was having. We only have our servers to upcp (upgrade cPanel) every night around midnight - 3 am, therefore the newest updates won't be on our servers yet. We've also downgraded cPanel to the stable version of 11.24 on our shared and reseller servers, so there shouldn't be anymore issues.

If you are still having issues, please email support@hostgator.com and we'll be able to take a look and get these fixed. We are still working through all the issues caused by this updates, so support might be a little slower today than usual.

As always, thanks for your patience and understanding!

Thanks for your reply Jacob.

I understand what your saying but isn't there anyway you can control cPanel updates? Do they have to be forced?

The fact that cPanel has the power to upgrade their software without any consent from you un-nerves me a bit. We literaly had no idea what was going on. Even if this happened unexpectedly why not email your resellers as soon as it happens so we can let our customers know straight away? That would have saved many support requests I'm sure.

[GvilleRick]

There are various settings in the root WHM that control the updates. On my dedicated I have it set up for manual updates and generally I wait a few days to update. With the number of shared servers HG has it would be worse, in my opinion, to have them set to manual updates rather than the automatic updates since failing to update can compromise the security. While most updates to cPanel go smoothly sometimes they don't. When they don't it makes for a long day for the techs.

[chaloupe]

Should we force the update again now as I also was update to 11.25 on all my vps's or revert to 11.24?

I've tested 11.25 for a month on a no-account VPS and it was a pain!

[GatorJoshL]

You should be safe to upgrade to 11.25 now as CPanel was actively fixing the issues with the update. Unfortuantely they were updating it AFTER it was release.

We have tested the 11.25 on our VPS' and it seems to be functioning properly now.

Originally Posted by chaloupe

Should we force the update again now as I also was update to 11.25 on all my vps's or revert to 11.24?

I've tested 11.25 for a month on a no-account VPS and it was a pain!

[chaloupe]

I agree with your GatorJoshL, cPanel 11.25.0(RELEASE) is stable on my VPS. I've been watching the VPS closely all day and everything is working as it should for now. No customer complaint today.

[GS-Liam]

When will it be upgraded again to 11.25 for reseller hosting?

Cheers

[pyrmontvillage]

AM contemplating dipping my feet into the reseller space with HG, so have spent some time reading through this section of the forums, and this thread was a worry. The fact that a forced update was allowed to permeate the ether, without much notice...hmm