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The backup drive resize on Cody has finished successfully and our main heliohost.org website is back online. Now that we have the space prepared to hold all the backups Tommy is now processing through all the accounts and backing everything up. When Tommy is finished we will make another news post letting you know how you can download your backup. Since the main website is back online you can now signup for a VPS if you want to have a server ready for when we take Tommy offline to rebuild him with Plesk. Let us know if you have any questions.

I have no idea how the last login will work but I know nobody is gonna get archived for being past the 30 day limit while this is going on. What I'm hoping for is that the 30 day login requirements be reset for all accounts that get unarchived once this is done.

Until we have Plesk working, email is not available. It'll probably be a month before we have a working server again as they require a full rebuild. Balloons posted the news above. If you need email in the meantime, you may want to use an external email provider (any service that allows custom email domains should work, Zoho and Yandex have both been mentioned in the past as choices that work). A VPS is also an option, but getting an email server installed and working without a control panel can be a challenge (though definitely possible, at least one person here has done it).

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

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.

That is wonderful news regarding the recent agreement with Plesk. I completely understand the need to take down Tommy and rebuild it. For my situation I have to decide whether to simply wait it out or to set up a temporary solution (such as the VPS). To help with that decision, could you offer a "ballpark" estimate of how long you anticipate Tommy being out of service and when it will begin? I would also be happy to make a donation to help defray the costs.

If you have international users, you can use a CDN like Cloudflare, MaxCDN, or KeyCDN.