CentOS lifetime :/

[barbara schendel]

Hey all,

Hi all,

For those of you who host websites for your clients, do you find that every couple of years you need to migrate all of your sites to another server in order to have an updated version of CentOS? I have had to do this twice so far in the 10(?) or so years since I've been with LiquidWeb and they are saying that it will be necessary again as CentOS 7 has reached end of life. 

It's a pain in the butt since whether I migrate or do an update-in-place, it takes a lot of time to coordinate and go through and carefully test (and possibly repair, if issues arise) each site that I host. 

I noticed that I never really hear other people talk about this, but it might just be that I have not asked. (or it could be that people aren't doing it even though perhaps they should?!)

I probably cannot afford to move everyone to a managed WP host, so I doubt that there is a way around this. But I just wanted to know if others also have to deal with this every few years too (I guess I just want to hear someone confirm that this is indeed just something you have to deal with when you host sites on a VPS instead of fully-managed host.)

Curious to hear others' experiences. 

Thanks!

[Alexander Celeste]

That is definitely a part of hosting any website. We use SpinupWP and have servers at Akamai. A lot of the server management is done for us, but every few years SpinupWP tells us it is time to migrate servers to update the underlying operating system. We’ve only truly been through this once in the 5 years or so we’ve run our own servers (other sites that live on more limited servers we’ve moved alongside launching major site redesigns). It is likely to come up again next year. The majority (in number) of our clients are hosted in one WP multisite install, so for them we just inform them x date is the migration date. We do try to schedule the standalone client migrations based around their needs, but within certain limits of a specific month.

But frankly this is just a part of running your own hosting. It also isn’t the only added task. For us SpinupWP installs many smaller updates as needed and is very helpful in helping us mange this (in fact, we couldn’t on our own), but some it leaves to us, and some that it does install require us to restart the server what averages about once or twice a month. We tell our clients that we will do these restarts on a specific weekend evening, and maintain a server status log to communicate these events.

Alex Celeste

St. Paul, MN

612-865-2183

al...@clst.org

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Minneapolis St. Paul WordPress User Group" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to mpls-stpaul-word...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/mpls-stpaul-wordpress/402435a0-4ac1-4f29-8896-91f5adf98ff4n%40googlegroups.com.

[Barbara Schendel-Kent]

Thanks Alex, 

That is what I thought. Good to have it confirmed though. :) 

~barbara~

[Toby]

Hi Barbara.  I don't recall ever hearing about a CentOS migration on shared hosting in my experiences with many shared hosts.  That said, I've experienced many IP address changes on shared hosts, where they forced me to go through a similar set of actions (and headaches) that you describe.  I wouldn't doubt if at least some of those IP address changes had to do with the CentOS updates even though they never mentioned CentOS.

Toby