Thegood.cloud "The server has reached end of life"

šŸ—ƒļø Hosting providers
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Hey :slight_smile:

I have a free thegood.cloud account. A couple days ago, I started getting the message ā€œThe server has reached end of life, please upgradeā€ in my client app. Thereā€™s no customer support for users of free accounts - hence my question here: Should I be bothered about it?

cheers

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Yes probably so. Is it talking about the Nextcloud server version being EOL? What version is it?

If you arenā€™t getting NC updates, thatā€™s a security hazard.

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@Nichtraucher
Can you post the url of the Nextcloud instance e.g. https://use05.thegood.cloud? After the TLD cloud, you can add /status.php to get the version. E.g. https://use05.thegood.cloud/status.php. For this url i get the version Nextcloud 23.0.7. And yes Nextlcoud 23 is End of Life look here.

Maybe you must move manually. Please read this article at the position End of life free01.thegood.cloud. Maybe it is the same for your Nextcloud server but there is only no article yet.

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^^

Yep, ā€œuse05ā€ is the one Iā€™m using. I checked the versions for their other servers and theyā€™re also outdated. Time to move on, I guess.

Many thanks for your guidance!

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Hi,

Looks like you found most information, but I have some clarifications:

  • free01.thegood.cloud is EOL indeed, it was our first free hosting server. We moved on to a diferent way of hosting so we could easier upgrade the free hosting environments. The EOL of free01 is mentioned as a one-off in the free01 EOL article. All the free hosting servers currently start with use and we donā€™t see any foreseeable future where they need to be EOL.
  • We have a N-1 policy concerning Nextcloud major versions. Which means we try to be on one version behind the latest. We have an employee who is 2 days a week just testing versions, new functionality, bugtracking, etc. and we see that we have to wait multiple minor versions before we can rollout a new version.
  • We have a schedule when we are upgrading to new versions, which can be found here: https://thegood.cloud/en/articles#availability-and-maintenance-2023. It shows we are have planned to upgrade on the 20th of April.
  • It is true we sometimes have EOL versions running which can be seen as a risk. However, due to the high major version releases, the considerable number of minor versions before we can rollout a major version and the fact we want to announce and plan upgrades we accept running with EOL versions for a short time. As we host business environments with subscriptions with a lifecycle of 1-5 years we get notified about any security issues on older versions, so the free hosting is benefiting from our knowledge so the risk is manageable in our view.
  • We are also talking with Nextcloud to license the free environments so the lifecycle is longer than the N-2 policy to bridge the (short) EOL timeframe.
  • Also, it is true we officially offer no support to free users, but itā€™s not as black and white so we wrote an article about the grey areas: https://thegood.cloud/en/articles#support-by-the-good-cloud

Hopefully this clarifies some things.

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@dennis-360ict
Thank you very much.

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@Nichtraucher Also just as an addendum, you can put the URL here and it will tell you the version.

https://scan.nextcloud.com

This also shows version 23.0.7. The final version of Nextcloud 23 was 23.0.12 released Dec 8 2022.

23.0.7 is about 6 months older than 23.0.12 so itā€™s quite an old version.

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Many thanks for the clarification! :smiley: :clap: I did notice the schedule. The warning message and the not so favourable sticky about hosting providers made me skeptical. It didnā€™t seem plausible to me that a provider would stick to outdated server software.

Many thanks for your service and have a nice weekend! :ok_hand:

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Providers should already plan their updates so that they never reach End of Life. But it must also be said that the release cycles are short and the supported releases in the community variant are few.

Maybe itā€™s a little like Android. It would be far better if the Nextcloud providers stick very close to the original and do not make any adjustments. For example, I only buy smartphones with Stock / Vanilla Android and not with additional bloatware. In the end, these providers ensure that Android has far less acceptance than iOS with their bloatware. And updates are also much shorter or not available at all.

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Here is some more insight on what we encounter keeping our deployments current:
https://thegood.cloud/en/articles#introducing-the-good-journal