Hosting company will delay auto-updates until after Christmas as a precaution.
Earlier this week I wrote about how GoDaddy auto-updated its managed WordPress customers to WordPress 5.0 shortly after it came out and why I thought this was a bad idea. This week I also interviewed Mika Epstein, a WordPress engineer at DreamHost, for an upcoming podcast and asked her how DreamHost was handling the update.
“In this case, because 5.0 was such a major update, we actually haven’t begun running our auto updates yet for customers,” Epstein said.
DreamHost usually pushes out updates quickly but made an exception for WordPress 5.0.
“If it’s a security update, we’re absolutely going to push it out immediately and run upgrades on everyone, but in this case, because it’s the change that involves the new WordPress blog editor, formerly known as Gutenberg, and because it is such a dramatic change to so many things, we opted to wait until after the holiday season.”
While most sites can handle the 5.0 update without a problem, the company didn’t want to risk an update that breaks a site (especially an ecommerce site) during this busy time of the year.
“It’s really a gamble,” Epstein said. “I’d love to say that the majority of sites are going to be fine with 5.0 and this is true. That said, the people that are going to break are our high profile customers, are our customers who have e-commerce stores who maybe haven’t been keeping up with all their plugins and their theme updates like they should.”
DreamHost will notify all customers about the update and give them a chance to opt-out before pushing out automatic updates.
Epstein noted that each hosting service will make an auto-update decision based on its user base.
Nick says
The 5.0 admin interface is very bloated. I have a strong dislike for it. Doesn’t even show frequently used tags anymore.
John says
I wasn’t going to say anything, but I tried them once for a few days. The user interface was absolutely unbearable compared to good old reliable cPanel, so I dropped it asap. I really wanted to like it, but I simply couldn’t one bit. I would never try again either.
Erin says
Thank you Dreamhost for not auto-updating to Craptenberg. We have many sites on Dreamhost and for them to potentially all break at once would have been a nightmare.