HelioHost is happy to announce that we're going to be upgrading the Ricky server soon.
You may have noticed that Ricky has crashed a few times over the last couple weeks. This is because he is long overdue for an upgrade. Occasionally we have to rebuild all of our servers to keep them in an acceptable operating state. We were originally planning on upgrading Ricky in spring 2020, but our plans were delayed because of the pandemic since it wasn't safe to travel in the US. We have finally gotten the hardware set up in our datacenter the way it needs to be so that we can upgrade Ricky now. As part of the upgrade process we need to temporarily move all the accounts off Ricky though. Then we will move Ricky from Stevie to the faster Charlie server. As a Ricky user you have a few options:
Do nothing. If you don't do anything your account will automatically get moved to the new Ricky located on Charlie. It's free, it's easy, and we'll take care of everything for you. The downside is your website will be offline for at least a couple days, if not a week or more. We're unsure how long it will take to upgrade Ricky, and until the upgrade is done your account will be offline. The last time we did a rebuild like this on Johnny it took 8 days, but Ricky could be longer or shorter depending on if we run into any problems.
Move to Johnny or Tommy for free. If you backup your Ricky account, and delete it you can resignup on Johnny or Tommy for free at midnight UTC. Keep in mind that signups are limited per day, and they will fill quickly. Tommy usually fills within a few seconds, and Johnny will surely fill faster than usual too since so many people will be moving off Ricky. We will increase the number of available free signups as much as we can, but there simply isn't room on our other servers to move all of the Ricky accounts over even temporarily.
Donate to be moved to Tommy. This is the best option if you want to minimize the downtime on your site. All you have to do is donate as little as $1 USD and a HelioHost admin will move your account to Tommy for you. You don't have to delete your account or signup again or anything. Just make the donation, post your transaction ID and username, and we'll take care of all the rest. Tommy is our flagship server, and as such has the best uptime, and fastest speed of all of our servers. Even after we upgrade Ricky we expect Tommy to be better so this is a great opportunity to move if you're interested. If you want to donate $5 or more we'll even throw in double storage space as well during the move.
Let us know if you have any questions. We plan on beginning the upgrade process in one week on February 6th.
Donate to Move