Is holding off on WordPress 5.0 updates — Why DreamHost

Hosting firm will delay auto-updates until following Christmas as a precaution.

A few days back I wrote regarding how GoDaddy auto-updated its managed WordPress clients to WordPress 5.0 shortly following it came out and why I thought this was a bad idea. This stretch 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, since 5.0 was such a major update, we actually haven’t begun running our auto updates yet for clients,” Epstein stated.

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, since it’s the change that involves the fresh WordPress blog editor, formerly known as Gutenberg, and since it is such a dramatic change to so many things, we opted to wait until following the holiday season.”

While most sites can handle the 5.0 update without a problem, the firm 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 stated. “I’d love to say that the majority of sites are going to be fine with 5.0 and this is true. That stated, the people that are going to break are our high profile clients, are our clients who have e-commerce stores who maybe haven’t been keeping up with all their plugins and their theme updates like they ought to.”

DreamHost will notify all clients regarding the update and give them a chance to opt-out ahead of pushing out automatic updates.

Epstein noted that each hosting service will make an auto-update decision based on its user base.