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Thank you all @Krydos @wolstech @Unknown025

We have recently received a few reports that someone has launched a phishing campaign to try to steal free HelioHost accounts. We're making this news post to remind you not to click any strange links in any strange emails claiming to be from us. A few things to keep in mind: If you contact support, 99.9% of the time you don't need to post your email address. The reason we require a username during signup is so you can contact support without disclosing any private information, such as your email address. We don't send emails from noreply.heliohost[at]gmail.com or from any other email services like outlook.com or yahoo.com. All of our emails will come from @heliohost.org, or if it's from our support forum, it will come from @helionet.org. We don't use a free Ngrok app to host our login page on some kid's laptop in Italy. Report these links to us or directly to abuse@ngrok.com to get it taken down quickly. We don't use AI to write strange emails to you threatening to suspend you for sending spam or any other reason. All of our emails are written by humans. Free signups are currently closed while we rebuild Johnny, but they will open again soon. There is no need to steal someone else's free account when you can just wait a week or two and then signup for your own account. It honestly doesn't make any sense to launch a phishing campaign against a charity to try to steal free accounts from people who are too poor to afford hosting, but I guess it's just more proof that most criminals are very very dumb, and since they're very very dumb, they resort to crime instead of legitimate activities. As obvious and sad as this phishing attempt is, if you're not paying enough attention or half asleep, it's possible you might accidentally fall for it. Don't click any weird links! Don't try to login to any weird phishing pages! Stay vigilant out there, people!

We've temporarily closed our automated VPS signups to make some upgrades to our billing system. In the meantime we can still build VPS manually. If you're interested in signing up for a VPS please select the plan you want from https://heliohost.org/vps and submit your email address. After your VPS request is submitted post at https://helionet.org or chat with us at https://heliohost.org/chat and we can manually email you an invite link to get your VPS set up. We hope to get the automated VPS builds without needing to contact support soon. Let us know if you have any questions.

Last week we had an issue with Brody and Cody, our nameservers, and we have been very busy during the subsequent days rebuilding them and getting everything back online. Since the older brothers were getting so much attention, the youngest brother, Johnny, threw a tantrum and demanded all of our attention. We noticed Johnny was acting up a couple hours ago, and shut him down to take a closer look. It turns out the master boot record needed to be rebuilt and the partition data needed to be reconstructed as well. We have access to the hard drive now, and it seems like most of the data is still intact. This could indicate that the hard drive is going bad though, so we've already started making backups of everything. It's actually interesting timing because Johnny was already scheduled to be rebuilt in the next month or two anyways, so we've just accelerated that plan. While the backups are being created we will be building a new Johnny on newer hardware and a more reliable hard drive raid array. Once all of the backups are ready we will let you know, so you can download them. If you'd like to get your website back online immediately, the Morty and Tommy servers are still operating normally, or you could even move to a VPS as well. If you'd like to stay on Johnny we will get the new server finished and the backups restored as soon as possible, but there is no promised ETA and it may take a week or maybe even longer.

There is a new Johnny running on the IP which is why you see a login page and johnny certs, but it's still being rebuilt. All the backend stuff has to be configured. When it is finished, we'll likely send invites for users to create new accounts since we can't recover the old ones. Users who took the free Morty trial will eventually be moved back to Johnny too if they decide not to purchase Morty plans.

Thanks for letting us know the hardware hiccups that resulted in extended outage. At day 10 now of "even longer", how is progress going? Domains hosted on Johnny are serving up johnny.heliohost.org certificates, so there seems to be some movement (but no account portal login).

First of all, sorry for the long downtime on our main website. Over the past few years our main database has just been getting slower and slower. It was last rebuilt in 2017 so it was well overdue for an upgrade. A few days ago the main database was so slow that we decided to take it offline, and rebuild it with a modern operating system and up-to-date software. We expected the downtime to last a few hours, but then during the upgrade everything fell apart. While Cody was down, his twin brother Brody got so sad he died too. This happens sometimes with twins because they can't live without each other, which is cute but also very tragic. So then, with both a dead Cody and a dead Brody, we had no nameservers, no main database, no website, no forum, no wiki, etc etc etc. But here at HelioHost we never give up. No matter how many servers explode, or how many evil for-profit corporations try to destroy us we will never give up. It took a few days, but our main website is back online, both of our nameservers are back online, our forum is working again, and a lot of the stuff going on behind the scenes are working again too. That said, there is still plenty of stuff that isn't working yet. The main issue seems to be that during the upgrade of the nameservers a lot of DNS zones got lost, so some websites are offline. If your domain gives a DNS error when you try to visit it in a browser let us know and we can take a look. It usually only takes a few seconds to recreate the DNS for you. We're still working on getting everything functional again, but we're making progress. Thanks for everyone's patience during this crazy rebuild.

Morty is getting upgraded! Our fastest and most up-to-date server is getting even faster and even more up-to-date. We will be starting a major upgrade soon, and wanted to let you know what to expect if you're on the Morty plan. What is changing: PHP: All of the versions of PHP currently available on Morty will still be available after the upgrade. Node.js: We are adding versions 25 and 24. All other versions of Node.js currently available on Morty will remain available after the upgrade. Python: We are adding version 3.14. Version 3.9 will remain the same. Version 3.12 will be removed. Django: We are adding version 6.0.4 running on Python 3.14. We are removing version 6.0.3 running on Python 3.12. Flask: We are adding version 3.1.3 running on Python 3.14. We are removing version 3.0.3 running on Python 3.12. Unfortunately, we don't have a way of tracking which accounts are using which Python modules right now. So if you're using any modules, please take a look at https://morty2-info.heliohost.org/pyinfo/info3.14.py as soon as possible, and request any modules that you'll need that aren't already available. In the future, we plan to add a system for tracking which modules each account needs, allowing us to pre-install them before an account is moved. For now, you will need to re-request them. You can reply to this email or click the contact support button below to let us know if any modules you need are missing. Another thing to keep in mind during an upgrade like this is that your IP address will be changing. If you use our nameservers, ns1.heliohost.org and ns2.heliohost.org, your DNS records will be updated to the new values for you. If you use external DNS, such as Cloudflare, you'll need to manually update your DNS records yourself. You will receive an email with the correct values when it's time to change them. If you don't want downtime due to incorrect DNS records, you could temporarily use our DNS until you're moved, and then go back to the external DNS afterwards. You will receive an email when your account begins its migration to the new hardware, and a second email when the move has completed. We are taking volunteers to be the first ones to experience the upgraded speed and features, so if you're ready to move, let us know. If you need a little more time to make sure your website is ready for the upgrade, let us know, and we can move you to the end of the list too. If we don't hear from your we will assume you're ready to move now. Let us know if you have any questions.

Our old nameservers broke, and we had to transfer all of the zone records to the new DNS servers. It seems like some of the zone records didn't get transferred correctly though. I flagged your post in the Staff channel, and the DNS has been recreated for you. Your website loads for me now. If you can't see it, please try clearing your browser cache. If you're a Discord user, you can keep an eye on the HelioHost #News channel for updates when maintenance is happening. If you haven't yet joined the Discord, here's the link to join if you want. For other users who may see this post: If your website is down and it says DNS_PROBE or some similar error please let us know (by making a new post in the support section at: HelioHost > Customer Service) which domain(s) of yours is having the problem, so the DNS can be recreated for you.

Is there an estimate for when the maintenance will be completed? My website (ateus.net) has been offline for days.

PHP 8.5 is now available on all of our hosting plans, including the free Johnny plan. We've also taken the opportunity to upgrade Plesk to the latest version and do a thorough upgrade of all system packages. The performance for the Johnny server has been a little slow for the last few days due to high load, but things are going back to normal now. There may have been a few errors messages as various services restarted, but now that the maintenance is over let us know if any of the error messages persist. We try to avoid doing upgrades too often, because they can cause downtime and slow performance, but it's critical to keep everything up to date to avoid vulnerabilities.

It looks like the upgrades from yesterday broke some of the email functionality of the Tommy server. Webmail wasn't working and receiving emails was failing as well. However, sending emails continued working. Webmail and incoming mails should be fixed now. Any emails that were sent to domains on Tommy overnight should work now because the remote mail servers should continue retrying now that the server is correctly accepting mail again. So no emails should be lost, but rather just delayed a bit. Thanks to the users who reported these issues. Let us know if you're noticing any other issues on the Tommy server after the upgrades.

Since our Johnny server is scheduled to be upgraded to faster hardware soon, so we've decided to increase the number of free accounts that we allow new users to create each day. After increasing the limits a few days ago we've seen free signups stay open for 10 minutes, 20 minutes, and even as much as 48 minutes. Keep in mind we have no direct control over how long free signups are open. We just monitor the uptime, speed, and load of the Johnny server. Then we take into consideration how many accounts get abandoned and go inactive each day. Finally we use all of that data to give away as many free accounts as we can, while still keeping the Johnny server "usable". Our goal is 97% uptime, and a load level of less than 20, which we consider good enough for a free service. If you need better uptime, or a faster loading website we have several upgrade options available. At times we've seen 20 accounts get reserved in less than a second, so even after raising the limit, it's still possible for signups to fill quickly. It really just depends on how many people are trying to signup each day. We generally don't disclose the exact number of signups available each day, because it can vary from day to day, but since the recent increase has caused free signups to stay open for nearly an hour it may be worth mentioning. If you're not very quick at clicking, this might be a good opportunity to get a free account, but if the uptime and speed of Johnny start dropping we may need to decrease the signups again. Our goal is to have free signups stay open as long as possible each day, but our free service is very popular so it tends to fill quickly. Let us know if you have any questions, or comments.

We're increasing the domain limit on the Morty server from 10 to 15! After a year of running our newest plan, Morty, we are still seeing great performance. This plan has nearly perfect uptime, great speeds, and Apache still restarts quite quickly. Therefore we are increasing the domain limit on Morty. If you need more than 15 domains you're welcome to create multiple Morty accounts, or switch to one of our VPS plans which allow unlimited domains. On the other hand, our free Johnny plan is still quite overcrowded and slow. In order to help speed up the server we're reducing the domain limit from 10 to 5. Our mission as a non-profit is to provide free hosting to as many people in need as we can. Our mission is NOT to provide free hosting to just a few people who each have a ridiculous number of domains. We think it best supports our mission to set a reasonable limit to make sure a few entitled people don't hog all of our free resources. If you need more than 5 domains you can make a one-time donation of only $2 to move to Tommy and have 10 domains available, or upgrade to Morty or a VPS. There are a few Johnny users who currently have more than 5 domains, and they will be allowed to keep their current domains for now, but if they want to add or change any of their domains, they will be required to comply with our new limit or upgrade to a plan that supports more domains. Let us know if you have any questions about the updating domain limits.

This morning the city in California where our datacenter is located had a power outage. It took the city a few hours to restore the power, but once the power was back on all of our servers booted up. Everything should be online and fully functional now, but if you notice any issues please let us know.

Your account is being reset. When the reset completes, you'll receive an email with a link to finish setting up a new account. After the process is complete, your old account's data will be available for download at https://heliohost.org/backup/ in case you need any of the content.