I am paying Euro 25 each month for hosting on Umbraco cloud upon the understanding that my site would be automatically updated. My site tells me it is running v7.5.14, but the latest stable release seems to be 7.9.2.
I'm assuming you only have a single Live environment, based on the price you are paying. In order to get the Minor version upgrades you need to have a development environment as well.
What you can do however, is manually add a development environment, tell it to do the sync and then the upgrade. Once the upgrade is complete you can remove the development environment.
It's a bit unclear in the documentation that this is a requirement for the Minor version upgrade process, but your single environment setup will only get the patch upgrades automatically.
It would seem that automatic upgrades, the key benefit of the Umbraco Cloud offering, are not really automatic and what's more they are not easy to do on the basic 'starter' package. It would seem I need to pay a further Euro 20 per month for an additional development environment, yes? Unfortunately, at Euro 45 per month this makes Umbraco cloud economically unviable for a non-profit site.
You seem to claim that major updates (e.g. version 7.x.x to 8.x.x) will happen automatically for 'starter' packages, but I can't see how that's possible if you're not doing minor releases automatically - clearly major releases are much more like to break existing sites. I suspect that the planned v8 will never happen, or that you will be forced into retrospectively changing the agreement. All this leaves an unpleasant taste and doesn't give me much confidence in your organisation. Please would you give me some reassurance that Umbraco Cloud is right for me going forward.
I've been looking at OurUmbraco on GitHub and it seems that work stopped on the 7.5 branch in May 2017. Therefore the security / bug fixes and new features promised as 7.5.x automatic updates stopped in May 2017. This is only a month after I started my subscription in April 2017. It would seem that the code running my site hasn't changed since May 2017. Is that correct? If so, you can probably understand why I'm upset. I've been paying Euro 25 per month to OurUmbraco for hosting + automatic updates and just got the hosting part, something that I could get much cheaper elsewhere.
I understand your frustration. You can just spin up the second environment when there is an upgrade that requires it and then remove it. This means you aren't charged for the whole month and is what I do for my site.
If there are any security patches that are required Umbraco are pretty good at patching affected versions so from that aspect I would be less concerned. But yes new features is frustrating as they generally come in Minor version upgrades, and that does require the extra environment to perform it.
So you are aware, this forum is predominantly the community helping each other out with issues and sharing knowledge and packages. It would be worth you using the support chat inside your cloud portal to raise your concerns with the Umbraco HQ directly.
If you've not used it before, or not seeing, it is in the bottom right when you log into Umbraco.io (the cloud portal). However, if you have any plugins like Disconnect in your browser it might not show. They are pretty good at responding (although on a Sunday, I don't know their response times are like). They are always trying to help and might be able to give you a full explanation into what you can do and any costs potentially involved :-)
You are right; it's not very clear how you contact Umbraco HQ from the Cloud portal. However, I finally found the link and will raise the issues there.
I don't spend much time on Umbraco as I'm too busy on my other projects (ASP.NET MVC, C++, AI, etc). The idea of paying for the cloud service was to run a website with minimal maintenance overhead. This isn't really working for me so I'm rethinking my plans.
Umbraco Cloud is not for everybody so it might be that you should revise your plan. Having said that - I believe its a good match for most sites.
Upgrades & Patch updates is only one of the key reasons why you would choose Umbraco Cloud. Theres also multi environments, moving content between environments and supporting development using visual studio locally.
About upgrades. I'd put it another way. Nobody (not even Umbraco Cloud) should touch my live environment. Period. I want to be in control and do some testing before going live with an upgraded site. That why the Umbraco Cloud is so great as you can just upgrade your dev (temporary created or not) test and move to live.
About patch updates. They are also applied to live. Im not a big fan of that either.
Hey Will.
In regards to contacting us - there is a chat bubble in Umbraco Cloud portal, you can always reach out there and we will be more than happy to help out and answer any questions you might have.
Minor Upgrades might have a breaking change, thus we don't want to "break" your Live environment - better safe than sorry, right? You can click the button yourslef whenever you want and test if everything is working as it should, if it does you just push the upgrade to your Live site and voila.
That will save you a lot of time :)
Why isn't my site being automatically upgraded?
I am paying Euro 25 each month for hosting on Umbraco cloud upon the understanding that my site would be automatically updated. My site tells me it is running v7.5.14, but the latest stable release seems to be 7.9.2.
Hi Will,
I'm assuming you only have a single Live environment, based on the price you are paying. In order to get the Minor version upgrades you need to have a development environment as well.
What you can do however, is manually add a development environment, tell it to do the sync and then the upgrade. Once the upgrade is complete you can remove the development environment.
It's a bit unclear in the documentation that this is a requirement for the Minor version upgrade process, but your single environment setup will only get the patch upgrades automatically.
Sorry about that.
Nik
Hi Will
Have a look at this documentation about automatic upgrades on Umbraco Cloud
https://our.umbraco.org/documentation/Umbraco-Cloud/Upgrades/#minor-version-upgrades
Hope this will give you some more info why your site is not upgraded to the latest version
/Dennis
It would seem that automatic upgrades, the key benefit of the Umbraco Cloud offering, are not really automatic and what's more they are not easy to do on the basic 'starter' package. It would seem I need to pay a further Euro 20 per month for an additional development environment, yes? Unfortunately, at Euro 45 per month this makes Umbraco cloud economically unviable for a non-profit site.
You seem to claim that major updates (e.g. version 7.x.x to 8.x.x) will happen automatically for 'starter' packages, but I can't see how that's possible if you're not doing minor releases automatically - clearly major releases are much more like to break existing sites. I suspect that the planned v8 will never happen, or that you will be forced into retrospectively changing the agreement. All this leaves an unpleasant taste and doesn't give me much confidence in your organisation. Please would you give me some reassurance that Umbraco Cloud is right for me going forward.
Will
I've been looking at OurUmbraco on GitHub and it seems that work stopped on the 7.5 branch in May 2017. Therefore the security / bug fixes and new features promised as 7.5.x automatic updates stopped in May 2017. This is only a month after I started my subscription in April 2017. It would seem that the code running my site hasn't changed since May 2017. Is that correct? If so, you can probably understand why I'm upset. I've been paying Euro 25 per month to OurUmbraco for hosting + automatic updates and just got the hosting part, something that I could get much cheaper elsewhere.
Hi Will,
I understand your frustration. You can just spin up the second environment when there is an upgrade that requires it and then remove it. This means you aren't charged for the whole month and is what I do for my site.
If there are any security patches that are required Umbraco are pretty good at patching affected versions so from that aspect I would be less concerned. But yes new features is frustrating as they generally come in Minor version upgrades, and that does require the extra environment to perform it.
So you are aware, this forum is predominantly the community helping each other out with issues and sharing knowledge and packages. It would be worth you using the support chat inside your cloud portal to raise your concerns with the Umbraco HQ directly.
If you've not used it before, or not seeing, it is in the bottom right when you log into Umbraco.io (the cloud portal). However, if you have any plugins like Disconnect in your browser it might not show. They are pretty good at responding (although on a Sunday, I don't know their response times are like). They are always trying to help and might be able to give you a full explanation into what you can do and any costs potentially involved :-)
Thanks,
Nik
Hi Nik,
You are right; it's not very clear how you contact Umbraco HQ from the Cloud portal. However, I finally found the link and will raise the issues there.
I don't spend much time on Umbraco as I'm too busy on my other projects (ASP.NET MVC, C++, AI, etc). The idea of paying for the cloud service was to run a website with minimal maintenance overhead. This isn't really working for me so I'm rethinking my plans.
I appreciate your time in providing responses.
Will
Hi Will,
Umbraco Cloud is not for everybody so it might be that you should revise your plan. Having said that - I believe its a good match for most sites.
Upgrades & Patch updates is only one of the key reasons why you would choose Umbraco Cloud. Theres also multi environments, moving content between environments and supporting development using visual studio locally.
About upgrades. I'd put it another way. Nobody (not even Umbraco Cloud) should touch my live environment. Period. I want to be in control and do some testing before going live with an upgraded site. That why the Umbraco Cloud is so great as you can just upgrade your dev (temporary created or not) test and move to live.
About patch updates. They are also applied to live. Im not a big fan of that either.
Best Jesper
Hey Will. In regards to contacting us - there is a chat bubble in Umbraco Cloud portal, you can always reach out there and we will be more than happy to help out and answer any questions you might have.
There are multiples reasons why your site didn't recieve the upgrade, when we roll out auto-upgrades to Umbraco Cloud projects the very first thing that happens is a check of all environments on a project. We need to check if your environments are responding, if they are not, we won't run the upgrade. You can read more about it here - https://our.umbraco.org/documentation/Umbraco-Cloud/Frequently-Asked-Questions/#my-project-didnt-receive-the-auto-upgrade-why
Minor Upgrades might have a breaking change, thus we don't want to "break" your Live environment - better safe than sorry, right? You can click the button yourslef whenever you want and test if everything is working as it should, if it does you just push the upgrade to your Live site and voila. That will save you a lot of time :)
Best,
Georgs
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