EE Upgrades for Clients
On Twitter, Jeremy Congdon asks about how you handle keeping client sites up-to-date with new releases.
Hey
— Jeremy Congdon (@ImmergeDev) August 14, 2012#eecms devs How do you do EE Upgrades for your clients? Service Agreements? Upgrades with feature upgrades?
What’s your take?
Posted on Aug 15, 2012 by Ryan Irelan
Share on Twitter
Bj — 13:28 on 08.15.2012
We offer managed hosting to all our clients - it’s a bit expensive compared to regular hosting, but it ensures that EE+addons are always the latest versions. The alternative to managed hosting is hosting elsewhere, in which case we do not upgrade unless by request (=we’ll charge hourly for the job). Works well.
lebisol — 14:20 on 08.15.2012
I don’t follow how does “managed hosting” ensure that EE is up to date? You just pick update interval of 1 x month ‘update all’ approach or?
Thanks.
Bj — 14:31 on 08.15.2012
yeah, by ensure I meant ensure for the client that EE is always up-to-date. For us it’s a job we need to do regularly of course. When it comes to security releases we upgrade right away (mostly affects our WP sites), for regular releases we upgrade as soon as we can (usually the following friday).
lebisol — 14:53 on 08.15.2012
Ah I see, so it is still a labor of love. I thought maybe you found a secret way of streamlining the upgrade process
Thanks for sharing.
Bj — 15:07 on 08.15.2012
Hah, not sure if I’d call it love, but yeah it is labor at least
Rick — 17:16 on 08.15.2012
Has anyone found a way to deploy EE for multiple clients so that when you upgrade the core it updates all client sites automatically?
Brendan Underwood — 20:17 on 08.15.2012
How do you charge when those updates break functionality on a client website?
Bj — 02:37 on 08.16.2012
Brendan: we fix it free of charge (note that we only host websites that we created). That said, this is a pretty new arrangement, I imagine that if we were to upgrade from 1 to 2 (or in the future from 2 to 3) we’d charge.
Timo — 04:12 on 08.16.2012
Something I’ve been really thinking about too, lately, and admit that I haven’t taken proper care of the issue in the past. Basically it comes down to time = money => is the client willing to pay?
Upgrades themselves are simple enough, but what if something breaks? Of course client needs the site to function and I need to be paid for my time. Usually upgrades shouldn’t affect properly implemented sites, but you never know - especially with if you have multiple add-ons. The size of the site and client also affects heavily into how smoothly this would go.
Lately as my projects have grown in size I’ve realized this is truly something that needs to be dealt with. I’m thinking about a service where upgrades will happen in timely fashion and will be billed either hourly or by level of service (frequency of updates). Most important thing for the client is that it’s taken care of. Some value this more than others. I want to deal with those who understand its significance.
Brendan Underwood — 04:19 on 08.16.2012
Bj
lebisol — 11:27 on 08.16.2012
For the most part updates go smooth if you do them frequently but clients almost Never do.
Totally agree, but what makes it worse is that you can not give a fixed quote for EE updates…because “you never know”. If you do, chances are some updates can eat up more time that they end up costing you in time and money loss. Never mind the embarrassment of having to wait for EL to fix the bug - if you are lucky that is just the bug and not some crazed script that chewed up your database structure.
This is very frustrating and is seriously killing ROI that used to be good with EE. I have started to dig more into PHP and look for other CMS packages that are breeze to update.