From: Matt Ferrari, Director of Platform and Storage Engineering

One of our valued partners recently wrote a blog entry that is a very pertinent use case for many of our current and prospective clients today. As mentioned in a previous engineering post, Hosting.com does offer a server replication service, which allows for business continuity in a managed dedicated or cloud based environment. Clients who are looking to fail over from one site to another without losing data or want to avoid a long service interruption to their customer base have embraced this technology. I’d invite you to read through the post by visiting this page and see if your cloud strategy aligns.

From: Daniel Lynn, Platform Engineer

In the near future, Hosting.com will be rolling out a new managed patching service for our managed dedicated and cloud servers. This new process offers a number of great improvements over our previous patching processes – most of them translating directly to advantages for our customers. We are cognizant that our customer’s each have their own operational process and we will continue to introduce functionality that is flexible and can be integrated into such process.

Obviously, we can’t offer better or more patches than our competition. Rather, we’ve tried to improve our patching process by offering our customer more control, more choice, and more visibility. We’ve created a module for our Customer Portal that allows our customer to see what updates will be run on their server and which updates have already been applied (see below).

As you can see, not only is the name of the update to be applied displayed, but you receive a description of that update and the date the update became available to the server.

More Control
You may also notice the 2 thumbs-up/thumbs-down buttons on the left-hand side. This is the part where we’re giving our customers more control. Before being run on a server, all updates must go through an approval process. Our Security Center of Excellence is tasked with ensuring that each update is safe to run on servers before it can be applied. However, each customer has the ability to make their own choices about their patching. A customer may expressly approve an update that they are comfortable running on their server or they may exclude an update, even if it has been approved by our staff. Additionally, these approvals and exclusions can be applied differently on each server a customer has. So, if your database server shouldn’t receive a certain update, excluding it will not prevent your web server from getting it.

More Visibility
Visibility and tracking of security updates is becoming more and more important in business. Our portal will help with this too. In addition to showing what updates will be run in the next patching cycle, a customer can also see updates awaiting approval, updates that have been excluded by our security team as unsafe, and a historic view of all updates on the server.

Take a peek at how the functionality will look by visiting here