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On a VPS you get the entire server to yourself. By default it's just a bare operating system with SSH command line access, but you can install any web based control panel you want except for cPanel. If you install cPanel and pay those bastards a single cent I will delete your VPS myself. One popular configuration is Ubuntu 20 operating system and Hestia free control panel. You can of course do everything from the command line too without a web based control panel. In that case you would just install a web server, such as Apache or Nginx, and then you would need to install Postgresql and import your databases in, and you would need to install a php version as well. Control panels can make all that easier to manage by installing it all for you. Feel free to do some research on control panels before you submit your vps request. Some control panels only work on certain operating systems so you would need to select the custom option, and choose your os. Ubuntu 20 with Hestia does support Apache, Postgresql, and PHP which you use now.

Less than 24 hours later we have already managed to negotiate and sign a contract with Plesk that is even better than the one we had with cPanel. It's going to be a lot of work to rebuild everything with Plesk, but in the long run this will be a good thing to get rid of cPanel. Plesk can run on Windows and Linux so we will be able to offer a unified system that includes all of our existing Linux servers as well as our Windows server Lily. Since Lily will have a real control panel it will make it much easier to create an account on her and give easy access to many more people to develop their websites for free using Microsoft's ASP.NET. Plesk is excited to be given the opportunity to supply the control panel that we use to provide much needed assistance to thousands of students, the underprivileged, and small businesses around the world that cannot afford to pay for hosting. Part of the contract includes our permission for Plesk to feature our logo, our mission, and our success stories on their website. Honestly, we couldn't have even hoped for something more perfect than this. It's going to take some time to get everything switched over though. Now that we have a new contract for a control panel our next highest priority will be backing up everyone's account. Then we will wipe Tommy and rebuild him using Plesk, and begin restoring accounts. After that will be Ricky, and Johnny. In the meantime you might consider a VPS to keep your site online using the same domain that you have now. You can find the VPS signup page at https://www.heliohost.org/vps/ Let us know if you have any questions or need help with anything during this painful transition. Thanks for being a member of the HelioHost community.

The Cody server, which hosts our main heliohost.org website, will be down for a bit because we're increasing the size of the backup drive to accommodate the addition of all the Tommy, Ricky, and Johnny accounts that we will be saving into our backup system soon.

I wonder what cP is thinking right now now that we dropped them in under 24 hours. cP: "Hey these guys have been a 16 year customer and we're losing money on them, they'll just pay up if we demand 17k no matter how small they are" HH: Switches to Plesk. cP: *pikachu face* (if they had done any research on us, they'd realize we quite literally can't afford their product). As for why cP is so expensive nowadays, digging shows that apparently they'd gotten bought back in late 2018 by a VC firm...which explains the massive price hikes they had. VC firms basically exist to extract as much money as they can from an acquired company. Either it becomes extremely profitable (often at the expense of its customer base) and they ride the gravy train for a while then sell it, or they fail at making it profitable, in which case they squeeze what they can out then pile debt from other investments into it and let it go bankrupt (see Toys r us).

If you think he's joking, go right ahead.

I've actually been looking at Plesk for years ever since we set up Lily, but obviously the control panel is the foundation of an entire web hosting company so switching is a massive undertaking. There are very few control panels that run on Linux and Windows. Some run on just Windows, and most run on just Linux, but not both. Plesk will allow us to have both Linux servers and a Windows server and it will tie everything together. I would love to go with free and open source, but as far as I know only a few open source projects have experimental support for Windows hosting so far. As soon as I contacted Plesk asking them if they could help us, they literally dropped everything they were doing to get us a contract to sign before I changed my mind and looked elsewhere. Plesk, unlike cPanel, realizes that a verified and experienced non-profit with the purpose of providing free hosting is a gold mine for public relations. It's actually part of the contract that I signed that we have to let them put our logo and story on their website. This will make them look really good, and they know it. Plus as a free host we attract a lot of people who are new to hosting, and have zero experience with any control panel. Over the years we have gotten literally hundreds of thousands of people hooked on cPanel. When they move on to paid hosting they make sure that cPanel is available before they signup because that is what they know and love from using it here. Now we can get all those people started on Plesk instead. 100% without a doubt cPanel thought that we couldn't survive without them, and we would just give up and hand over the $1442 per month to keep their licenses. Absolute pure greed. If the reason was anything other than money they wouldn't have just said "you can buy full licenses".

I liked cPanel better. (aside from them jacking heliohost) anyways Plesk has a demo page if you want to check it out. https://docs.plesk.com/try-plesk-now/

Yep, I saw it on Discord. Marking as solved.

Sorry about that. The VPS signup page is really new, and only 2 people have used it so far. I added NO_SHIPPING to the code which should fix that issue. Let me know if you're still having issues. Thanks for letting me know about it. Thanks for testing our Facebook donations. No one has ever donated via Facebook before so I'm not sure how the fees will compare to Paypal. However, for VPS it would be best to use the actual VPS page because it sets up a subscription that autobills on it's own. With a Facebook donation it doesn't automatically update the expiration date in the database, and I'll have to manually track it.

As time is critical to migrate to Plesk, I offer my "sysadmin" time if needed let me know if I can be of any help . And for the community member who can have their website "static" I can offer them a temporary "hostless" solution the time Tommy is rebuild as long as the DNS records of their site can still be updated ?

https://www.helionet.org/index/topic/44330-new-partnership-with-plesk