Unannounced maintenance

[rec9140]

This is the SECOND time that LAST MINUTE announcements have been made of maintenance to the VPS systems...

This is ABSOLUTELY TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE AND UN-PROFESSIONAL!

I refer to todays announcement:

http://forums.hostgator.com/vps-secu...ce-t88764.html


And the previous one....

http://forums.hostgator.com/vps-kern...es-t85868.html

Do you understand that updates, upgrades, maintenance that will cause reboots of servers need to NOTIFY YOUR *-> CUSTOMER <-* 24 HOURS IN ADVANCE

I get minor network maintenance notices 7 DAYS in advance on my dedi servers... 7 DAYS via email! Not minutes before it happens and down time occurs!

This is just another mark, a VERY BLACK MARK, in the negative column that is starting to grow.

Yes. I am mad, and this is just about the last straw that will break the camels back...I am beginning to review other providers for my VPS and reseller accounts, along with the accounts I am in control of for work... HG and I are just not on the same page.

I agree that maintenance needs to be done, but theres an emergency and then theres normal maintenance...

HG needs review its notification procedures to its customers and let me point out that:

twidiot
idiotbook
dorqspace

and similar means are NOT ACCEPTABLE!

EMAIL to effected customers IN ADVANCE. That should be the first step, period.

[GatorJLavoy]

Hello,

I apologize for your feelings on this matter. Unfortunately these are major security updates that require a quick response. Waiting to patch these issues would mean leaving our VPS's insecure, which is something we are not willing to do. We are very serious about our networks security. We do in-house kernel development and release patches regularly to battle against zero day exploits and other security issues.

We apologize for any inconvenience this issue may have caused, but in all cases, we try to remain on the side of caution, and security.

If you have any further questions please feel free to let us know.

Have a wonderful evening.

[rec9140]

Originally Posted by GatorJLavoy

I apologize for your feelings on this matter. Unfortunately these are major .

This is the answer I expected, and does NOT WASH! PERIOD!

You want to pull these updates you send out an EMAIL!

Not just post an announcement on a forum, and start updating.

The ONLY REASON I found out about the reboots was that the alerts that are built in to my server went absolutely nuts... That IS NOT how I should find out about updates.

These security updates while important require NOTICE to CUSTOMERS... you know those PITA people who PAY THE BILLS!

These SAME SECURITY updates brought NOTICE emails 24 HOURS IN ADVANCE for my dedi servers, which obviously are NOT with HG.

Its clear that HG values scheduling these updates to their staffs benefit and expedience is more important than the customer.

This is the kind of actions that spreads ill will, and leads to EX-CUSTOMERS and you can count me headed in that direction.

Very disappointed.

[virtvir5]

I've seen and experienced too many contrary cases for any single incident to make me believe that HG values expedience above its customers.

That aside, however, if any down time action is 'scheduled', whether for security or any other reason, it would certainly seem reasonable to expect notification to be provided as soon as that schedule is decided upon. The pertinent issue is whether this particular situation involved such a dire threat that it necessitated immediate action less than 24 hours after the decision was made. If so, then HG's urgent response, even if it involved some 'expedient' shortcuts in the notification routine, was in their customers' best interest as well as their own.

Do you disagree with that assessment?

[letuboy]

I concur with this. It'd be AWESOME to have at least an email saying that the server would be down, if even 30 minutes before hand. That way we can actually be aware of WHY the server is down, so that if a customer calls us complaining that he/she can't access their website, then we won't be stumped as to the reason, and will have a valid explanation.

Even though this was posted in the forums, we are busy server administrators and developers. We can't check the forums 24x7 for updates from HostGator.

We have customers too, HostGator.

[virtvir5]

Aren't cPanel's announcements subscriptions fulfilling that email notification function properly? Of course, they won't help if the down time isn't scheduled and notified in a timely manner.

[letuboy]

If there's an option to get updates from HostGator on one of their VPS's, then I don't know about it..

[virtvir5]

Not sure about that, Paul, as I'm on a shared server account myself. I can only tell you that my own cPanel includes an email subscription option for announcements as shown in the attached image. Is it not available for VPS users? If not, perhaps it could be made available as one possible answer to these concerns.

[GatorDaveC]

Hello,
All of our updates are done without rebooting the servers since we are using ksplice. The reason why some of the VPS's need to be shut down for a couple of minutes, is because some of the processes being spawned were interrupting the rebootless update from being applied.

Most of our servers were able to apply the patch fine, without any containers being shut down. It really all depends on what people are running. Our number one goal is to keep our clients secure.

In this case there was a root escalation exploit that was released out into the wild. The portion of the kernel code was being used fairly heavily by users which is why some of the containers needed to be shut down.

In the future we will get some sort of E-Mail notification system in place, although in cases like this, you might not get e-mailed until 10-30mins before we actually start updating.