On Jun 6, 2007, at 7:45 AM, Robert Douglass wrote:
Sean Robertson wrote:
Why can't ISPs upgrade without breaking older apps?
They can, and we want them to. They're just lazy, afaik.
Indeed, if I might interject a point here to support this idea. While it probably is lazyness to some degree, what I've found to be true with the vast major of hosting companies is that they are running off of the stock Control Panel applications, and many of them are running on SW-Soft's products (Plesk and Virtuozzo). As a former Gold customer (recovering, we're now using mostly XEN, VMWARE, and some other higher end systems for everything), I know that the support policy for SW-Soft with regards to PHP is the OS Support Upgrade Policy (that's what they called it, I've never seen it actually). They will provide support for only whatever the vendor has released on the platform, including any extended applications like PHP and MySQL. For hosting companies with any kind of integrated system, or those in need of second tier support from SW-Soft, doing an upgrade can invalidate their support agreements (you're always riding the line on this one if you need "advanced upgrades," aka something that's relatively new) and break their setups. In fact, doing an upgrade with SW-Soft's popular HSP Complete system of php or mysql will almost certainly functionally break the entire control panel. In addition, it's extremely difficult to do a full OS upgrade with many contol panel solutions, as they're using a lot of custom rpms and the like, so things tend to stay in place and get patched. For example, with HSP Complete (again, just an example), it's not actually possible to do an upgrade - you have to delete the customer virtuozzo environment and re-create it since it tracks rpms granularly. So, we're moving at the speed of RedHat. Actually, most times, RedHat running through CentOS. And since so many of the upgrades are actually attached to the OS Upgrades, and since it's difficult to do an OS Upgrade, things tend to stagnate across the entire industry. Occasionally some brave sysadmin will stand up and start releasing packages. For big hosting customers with a lot of purchase power (think GoDaddy, 1&1, BlueHost, etc), this is absolutely an option. But for the long tail, obstacles remain. But most big companies will only patch when they have to, and leave the support up to companies like SW-Soft. So, it's not as much the hosting companies that need convincing - it's the vendors that write the Control Panels that have the real authority - they're the ones that need convincing. And I don't think they're planning to fix some of the upgrade os problems anytime soon (just ask me the difference between an insert and overlay control panel - my own terms - sometime). I think it would be worth rallying around the flag on this one, and you'll certainly get link juice from me about it, but I don't thin it's a question of hosting company lazyness exclusively.
I am a huge fan of this idea overall, BTW. I think migrating apps to PHP5 will start forcing ISPs to at least provide the option to upgrade since they'll start losing customers if they don't. That's the point.
Indeed. Jonathan