From what i have read in the past “shell” access (root is probably not required) is not mandatory but still highly recommended to fix issues or do maintenance works via the “occ” command line tool which you can’t use when not having shell access.
Concerning the “update” is missing i have linked two recent discussions below. Maybe you need to just switch from “production” to another channel as “production” sounds to me like something you’re not directly getting fresh updates.