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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.

There are some surprisingly good free VPS deals out there, both short and long term. You'd want to avoid ones that don't come with an IP v4 address though. Oracle's Free Teir is pretty amazing. If you pick their ARM-based VPS you apparantly get four "OCPU" cores with 24 GB RAM between them, 200GB+ storage, two IPv4 addresses, and 10 TB outbound data per month, with no expiry date. Detailed specs. However when I tried to sign up it failed, apparantly due to a problem with confirming my identity via my Visa Debit Card (which is required even though they don't charge unless you use their paid services). That's probably because I'm Australian though, and the exact same thing happened when I tried to sign up for AWS's free VPN years ago. Support aren't interested in helping (though at least Oracle's support replied to me, AWS just left me hanging).

If you want to gamble on Tommy being back in a month, perhaps you could sign up for a one-month trial at Linode or some similar service? They provide pretty decent VPSes. If it's a long-term open source project, you could also apply for free hosting at Fosshost. I'm not sure how strict they are, but it might be worth a shot. I don't think they're interested in short-term operations though, and there's a submission process you have to go through. I've also used Byethost in the past; they have a cPanel-based setup although it seemed slightly shady and they try to push you to upgrade to Hostinger, whom I think are their partners. Speaking of which, if you're willing to spend a couple of dollars just for the month, Hostinger has mildly restricted plans starting at $1.39/mo. Nothing perfect, but they might be able to keep you running till Tommy's back. Good luck!

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).

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.

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'm from Japan. 🗾 Did you plan to go to Tokyo? 🗼 I will also see it on my PC. It seems that many people from Asia use HelioHost, but few on the HelioNet forums. Sign-up update time UTC 0:00 is morning in Asia. It will be easy to sign up. 🌅💻🥪