By SheilaHoff on

Brand new to Drupal. I've noticed that with all open-source tools there are frequent security updates needed as well as other updates. I'm considering a Drupal site for an all-volunteer group that doesn't want to be dependent on a webmaster. They just want the site setup and then any non-techie to be able to easily add content and not worry about it. I'm wondering if there are any Drupal hosting companies that will actually do the updates automatically as needed as part of the hosting fee. Or is this a stupid question?

I've never used chron before either...It suddenly occurs to me that maybe setting up chron would do this for them? If so, is it easy to set that up?

Thanks
Sheila

Comments

dman’s picture

dman commented

The thing about security updates it that they require changes to files that you want protected :-)
The last thing you want to do is allow a web daemon to be able to modify the at-risk files!

That said, it's maybe not such a silly idea if rather than a drupal-web cron task there was actually a system-level cron job that could do it some things like that in the background. There's probably a dozen reasons why this is not simple though. Most updates deliberately require some sort of interaction. Interaction that cannot/should not be authorizable through the web interface.

just a thought.

.dan. is the New Zealand Drupal Developer working on Government Web Standards

-Anti-’s picture

-Anti- commented

I'm interested in this kind of question too.

> It occurs to me that maybe setting up cron would do this for them?

I gather that there are people working on 'automatic upgrades' for core.
But I think that this kind of feature is still a couple of years away.
Not sure whether 3rd party modules would be included in that anyway.

> I'm wondering if there are any Drupal hosting companies that will actually do
> the updates automatically as needed as part of the hosting fee

Perhaps not automatically, but it is probably possible to periodically ask such host
to log in to the site and do some maintenance for a fee. It would depend very much
on the host I think.

> for an all-volunteer group that doesn't want to be dependent on a web master

As I understand it, a part of a web developer's income is generated from the
after-care maintenance and development of existing sites, as it is probably too
high an expectation for most clients to become proficient enough to be able to
update and develop themselves. But I'd be interested in hearing from any
professional developers about this.

steve hanson’s picture

steve hanson commented

Well -
We do this for our hosting clients. We provide a basic hosted level of Drupal and install security and bug-fix updates after they've gone through our testing process. (this is just through the current version - so we do for example, Drupal 6 level updates to modules and upgrades as part of the support contract - upgrades to a new Drupal revision aren't included).

But the thing is - this isn't the same sort of thing as providing your typical $10/month hosting. So we're understandably more expensive than that. And we have some limitations on which modules we'll support (that is, there are a lot of really broken modules floating around and we don't support them).

Our hosting typically starts at about $50/month depending on what your needs are. You might also want to either look at using Acquia Drupal, which includes some automatic updating, or using one of the other companies that provides Drupal as a supported service .

I think in general the point here is that you can get this sort of service, but you're going to have to expect to pay for it ---

Steve Hanson
Publisher Eye On Dunn County
https://eyeondunn.com