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Thanks for the great post. I'm sure there are others who are thinking the same as you. Storytime! When I created my first account in 2009 there was only one server: Stevie. I stayed up until 2am local time three nights in a row to get my account because Stevie signups filled so quickly. The first night I wasn't paying much attention and didn't check until about ten minutes after. The second night I set some alarms and mashed the F5 button and still didn't manage to get an account. The third night was the charm and I managed to get an account. At the time there was no option to donate to get an invite. Your only option was to stay up until the middle of the night. I had used a lot of free hosts, and over the next few days as I began to use my treasured Stevie account I realized that there was something special about Heliohost. It was like night and day between other free hosts and Heliohost. Based on those first impressions, and my interactions with the admins at the time when I had problems lead me to believe in the Heliohost concept. I saw that the admins were fairly overworked for being volunteers, and I started helping out on the forums. Just simple stuff like posting links for people who couldn't find them on their own, etc. After ~100 or so helpful posts the admins started to notice, and after some internal discussion decided to promote me and give me access to some tools so I could be even more helpful. Fast forward a bit, and I've basically gone from just a random user who found Heliohost out of the hundreds of other free hosts, to essentially running the whole thing. When I took over as root admin I inherited a Stevie with an abysmal ~65% uptime, and Johnny was even worse. Through seven or so years of experience with free hosting I've come to realize that you can have uptime or you can have unlimited signups. You can't have both on the same server. If you have unlimited signups the server gets overloaded and then everyone complains about how bad the uptime is. If you have 99.9%+ uptime then people start complaining about not being able to create an account. My solution: Have experimental servers with unlimited signups, and have stable servers with limited signups. Right now we're having some pretty serious hardware issues on our ancient 8 year old machines. That's why we're asking for donations for the first time in the 12 years that Heliohost has provided hosting for free. Stevie had a hard drive fail completely, and Johnny seems to be having some sort of hardware failure too. We need to repair our servers, and buy new hardware. That takes money. Tommy is an amazing server, but without multiple servers we can't have an experimental server with open signups like you want. If we can raise enough funds to make repairs Stevie and Tommy will be our stable servers with great uptime, and Johnny will be our experimental server with unlimited signups. There's a big difference in my opinion between an upsell and a donation. First of all there is nothing special about a donation account versus a free account on Tommy. There is no difference between a free Tommy account, a $1 donation Tommy account or a $100 donation Tommy account. Donations definitely aren't required to have an account on Tommy. We just wanted to express our gratitude for the donations we receive so we think it's fair to give a gift in exchange. A Tommy invitation link is that thank you gift. Anyone who donates any amount gets the same gift. A parallel to consider here is a free public radio or tv station. They broadcast their signal for free for anyone to listen or watch. We provide free hosting to anyone who signs up and uses it. The radio or television station takes money to continue operation. Our free hosting takes money to continue operation. If people don't donate to free public radio or public tv stations they go out of business. If we don't get enough donations we're going to go out of business too. When you make a donation to a public radio or tv station they may give you a thank you gift like a coffee mug or a shirt. When you make a donation to Heliohost we give you the gift of creating your account a little easier. If you can't make a donation, that's fine. Enjoy the free service, and hope that enough other people make enough donations to keep your service free. If you can make a donation please know how much we appreciate it, and also know how much all of the people who can't make donations appreciate it. Some of our users are under 18 and can't use paypal. Some of our users live in Iran and can't transfer money to us. We at Heliohost believe in free hosting for everyone. Everyone should be able to have their own website.

The manual Stevie backup has been executed and here are the results. Additional backed up information was retrieved on the following accounts: icgit files/mysql calebt /home/calebt/softaculous_backups/* xnyten files/mysql stamp /home/stamp/softaculous_backups/* tarock files/mysql hippo /home1/hippo/django & databases & pyenvs & pymodules ddatzert mail sharamke files infantex files/mysql No additional backed up information could be retrieved for the following accounts: iceitsup files (specifically /home/iceitsup/public_html/Dev if easier) antonio3 mysql wikinet mysql flradio mysql rutaj6 mysql foxsemp mysql mup mysql giraffe mysql pinteric /home/pinteric/mail/* mihail files/mysql mkgamers files/mysql parcela files/mysql gamegoof files/mysql elswob files/mysql adjutant /home/adjutant/tablecat.co.cc/* thomasho files/mysql syahdan files midokaed files/mysql zimmer files tomk files/mysql mariusm9 files vholtta files/mysql azuzard files gowenrf files/mysql sylwiak files/mysql peakwest files/mysql rsprog psql philip98 psql zephyre psql arty /home/arty/internalscr and postgresql pmo files/psql

This support request is being escalated to our root admin.

Krydos will send it when he sees the notification (they're sent manually). Usually they come within a few hours. You'll receive the email at your Paypal/Skrill email address, so be sure to look out for it, and be sure to check in spam. If you don't get it by tomorrow, start a new topic over in customer service and I'll escalate it so Krydos can resend it.

Sent.

I think this one's a new record...at least in the 6 years I've been here. I can't recall a day where signups actually opened, but didn't record on the monitor as being open for a minute or two. That monitor has a pretty good resolution, so being fast enough to not get caught by it is quite impressive. We didn't expect Johnny to fail. Nobody did. It's just as bad for the admins as it is for the users. We're spending our time helping those users move to Tommy now, after we just did it to move them to Johnny. Many of those users were already upset at losing the Stevie account, let alone a Johnny one too. It's also worth noting that it'll likely get a little easier to sign up as the days go by. The number of signups we allow per day on a new server typically increases with time. We still have bugs to work out with the signup process (which we recently redesigned with our new website). We don't know how Tommy will handle lots of users. As a result, we don't want them piling on all at once, then all complaining when their accounts didn't create right / the server crashed / etc. Once we see days where small numbers of new accounts go smoothly, we increase it. Similarly, as Johnny users finally get Tommy accounts, there's less of an initial rush, so demand drops. As a result, the registrations stay open longer. Waiting a few days for the initial rush to die down first will probably help. It took me multiple tries to get a Stevie account back in 2011...at 3AM local no less! I was an overworked college student then...the last thing I wanted to do was stay up to 3AM for a hosting account with what little sleep I was getting, especially knowing there was no guarantee I'd be successful. I finally got one after several tries though, and have no regrets. Stevie gave me ~5 years of good service, and I expect Tommy to do the same.