Managing multiple cpanel servers

[alexxo]

Can anyone recommend an application for managing multiple cpanel servers. More like what network management systems are to network equipment.

Also, let me know how you manage upgrades while hosting thousands of accounts. Do some of your customers website break and how do you mitigate that.

 

[bhd]

Whenever you do an upgrade something is bound to break. Recently upgraded some servers from PHP 5.2 to 5.3. Even after telling customers long before the time, we still had a few who chose to ignore it and ended up with broken sites. Mostly, we just upgraded the broken sites ourselves.

(It's important to remember many customers actually hire someone to install their Wordpress or whatever they use even though it's really simple to do - especially with automated installers. Unfortunately after some years of hosting and no updates, the scripts are time bombs with exploitable code so forcing an update is not necessarily a bad thing even though some customers may get all "Help!!! Site broken!!!" about it)