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It took a little longer than we expected, but everything should be back online now. The performance of the main database is definitely much faster now. Let us know if you notice anything that isn't working right.

We're still working on getting access to the Johnny hard drive, and we're still hopeful that we can get everyone's data off of there. It's just going to take some more time. We haven't given up yet. Some good news though, is we're getting closer to releasing the Morty server. We should be able to get the first beta testers moved over in the next week.

Last month we made some changes to our MariaDB connection limits after multiple users abused our generous unlimited connections settings and caused hours of downtime for all of the other users on the server. Since then we've received quite a few complaints from people who are now being forced to write good code when their software tries to open dozens if not hundreds of connections. You need to keep in mind that if you're on Johnny or Tommy you're sharing the server resources with thousands of other users, and it isn't fair for you to hog all the resources. If you want to open unlimited connections we offer VPS plans starting at only $4 per month where you will have the whole server to yourself. If you are getting errors regarding the connection limit, and don't want to get a VPS, please let us know and we can help you rewrite your bad code. We wanted to point out that even though the noisy minority may not like the changes, the server is now much more stable for the silent majority. Prior to the limits MariaDB would crash 4-5 times per day on both Johnny and Tommy and it would take 2-5 minutes for the database to come back online each time. Now MariaDB on both Johnny and Tommy is able to run for weeks without a restart which increases the uptime and stability for the server as a whole.

Everyone please welcome the newest addition to our HelioHost staff, KazVee! A question that we get a lot is how to get promoted to admin. You need to do exactly what KazVee did by helping out on the forums and Discord with simple questions that don't require admin access. Since she continued helping out we took notice and offered to give her access to the admin tools so she can help out even more. Since we switched to Plesk control panel in 2021 a lot of our documentation on the wiki became extremely out of date. KazVee took it upon herself to completely overhaul and update our documentation which benefits all of our users. We've been asking our users to help out with the wiki for years, and KazVee was the one who finally stepped up and volunteered to take care of it. Here at HelioHost we all started as regular users helping out like KazVee, and eventually got promoted.

HelioHost is raising funds to purchase a new server! https://donorbox.org/rebirth-of-stevie In 2005, Ashoat, who was 14 years old at the time, came up with the ridiculous idea of giving away web hosting for free. He purchased the domain heliohost.org and a reseller plan, but it wasn't too long before there were so many people wanting to host their website for free on HelioHost that Ashoat had to buy a server to support them all. He named that first server Stevie. HelioHost now has several more servers, but Stevie is special because he was the first. We used that server as long as we could, but it eventually became too old to do anything useful anymore, so we unplugged it. We are going to hand poor old Stevie over to the recyclers soon, but that doesn't have to be the end for him... 2025 is HelioHost's 20-year anniversary, and what better way to celebrate this milestone than by reflecting on where we came from, and taking the next step towards where we are going. We can keep the spirit of Stevie alive to carry on his purpose even after his metal, copper, and silicon have all been melted down, by raising funds for a new server and naming it Stevie. Summary of thank you gifts (see fundraiser for details): $5 = +1000 MB on existing Morty, Tommy, or Johnny account. $10 = +2000 MB (to a max of 7000 MB) on an existing Morty, Tommy, or Johnny account. $15 = +3000 MB (to a max of 7000 MB) on an existing Morty, Tommy, or Johnny account. $20 = +4000 MB (to a max of 7000 MB) on an existing Morty, Tommy, or Johnny account. $25 = +5000 MB (to a max of 7000 MB) on an existing Morty, Tommy, or Johnny account. $30 = +6000 MB (to a max of 7000 MB) on an existing Morty, Tommy, or Johnny account. $35 = Early beta access to new Java and JSP hosting server before it is publicly available. $40 = +1000 MB on existing Morty, Tommy, or Johnny account, plus early beta access to new Java server. $45 = +2000 MB (to a max of 7000 MB) on an existing Morty, Tommy, or Johnny account, plus early beta access to new Java server. $50 = +3000 MB (to a max of 7000 MB) on an existing Morty, Tommy, or Johnny account, plus early beta access to new Java server. $55 = +4000 MB (to a max of 7000 MB) on an existing Morty, Tommy, or Johnny account, plus early beta access to new Java server. $60 = +5000 MB (to a max of 7000 MB) on an existing Morty, Tommy, or Johnny account, plus early beta access to new Java server. $65+ = +6000 MB (to a max of 7000 MB) on an existing Morty, Tommy, or Johnny account, plus early beta access to new Java server. Please don't let Stevie be forgotten. It will only take you a minute to give us a gift to help us achieve this goal. The money you donate is tax-deductible, and any amount big or small helps get us a step closer. Thank you so much!

Morty is finally ready, and we will begin moving the first beta testers over starting in a few minutes. If you're on the list of beta testers from our previous fundraiser you will receive an email when your account move starts. We will make a second announcement when Morty is available for existing users to move their Johnny or Tommy account to Morty which should be in a week or two. Then we'll make a third announcement when new users can signup for Morty accounts which will be a week or two after the second announcement. We hope that Morty will be worth the wait, and we look forward to hearing feedback on how the fastest server we've ever built is running.

For the first time in HelioHost history we are going to upgrade one of our servers with zero downtime. Normally when we do an upgrade it's because of some catastrophe, like a hard drive crash, or we just power off the old server causing everyone's website to be offline for a few weeks until we finish building the new server. We're happy to announce that the new Tommy server is already fully built with all the latest software and ready to go. In fact, all new donors are already receiving invites to the new server. The next step is to move everyone from the old Tommy to the new Tommy. The old Tommy has been running continuously for over 3 years. Over that time he has endured quite a few ordeals, and it's actually quite amazing that he is still running as well as he is. Unfortunately the old software and the old hardware has become quite slow, and we've decided it's time for our donors to be on a faster server. We are adding a lot of new features, and dropping a few old options listed below: PHP - We are adding version 8.3. The versions 8.2, 8.1, 8.0, 7.4, 7.0, and 5.6 will remain the same. We are removing versions 7.3, 7.2, 7.1, 5.5, 5.4, 5.3, and 5.2. Node.js - We are adding versions 22, 21, 20, and 18. The version 16 will remain the same. We are removing versions 17, 14, 12, 10, 8. Python - We are adding versions 3.12, and 3.9. We are removing versions 3.10, 3.6, and 2.7. Everyone who uses Python will need to request modules to be installed again. Django - We are adding version 5.0.7 running on Python 3.12. We are removing version 4.1.1 running on Python 3.10. Flask - We are adding version 3.0.3 running on Python 3.12. We are removing version 2.2.2 running on Python 3.10. If you're currently using a version on Tommy that is being removed we strongly recommend you start testing and upgrading your software as soon as possible to use a version that is available on the new server. If you need more time to test your software let us know and we can delay your account move to the new server. If it's not possible for you to use a newer version of the software, such as if you have PHP software that was last updated in 2007 and it will only run on PHP 5.2 please let us know so we can help get you moved over to a VPS plan that will support those ancient versions. If we don't hear from you, we will assume you're ready to move immediately. We're also taking volunteers to move first, so if you're eager to try out the new server let us know and we can move you to the top of the list.

If you have a Johnny account head over to https://heliohost.org/status/ to get yourself set up on the new, freshly rebuilt server. To recap the recent news, about a month ago we noticed quite a bit of input/output errors on Johnny's filesystem. This was surprising because we have redundant raid arrays, and checks in place to alert us if we need to replace a bad hard drive. Apparently the checks had failed, and the raid array was already pretty much destroyed. After failing to rebuild the array using the July 15th data multiple times we tried rebuilding the raid from a drive that was kicked from the array on March 8th. All of the data from March 8th to July 15th was already gone, but we managed to get people backups from the older data. Any changes or new accounts from March 8th until July 15th will need to be restored from your personal backups that you made yourself. Since Morty was approaching completion we quickly finished that server, and then cloned him to make a new Johnny. Setting up a new Plesk server with all of our customizations and settings is very time consuming, but using the cloning technique we managed to shorten the process to only a few days. All of the Johnny accounts that had backups available have been set into the archived state, so if you want to start using your account all you need to do is go to the https://heliohost.org/status/ and it will guide you through the renewal process. If your account was created after March 8th, there is no backup for you, but you can go to the same https://heliohost.org/status/ page and it will give you the option to recreate your account with the same plan and same storage space as you had before. The account will be as empty as a brand new account always is, and then you can restore whatever personal backups you made. If you're having any issues with getting your account working again, let us know, and we can fix it. We have made a lot of changes already to prevent something like this from happening again in the future. Sorry for the downtime, and thank you for your patience.

The extremely time consuming raid rebuild process has finished and Sparkie is back online. All of the VPS on Sparkie seem to have booted up just fine, but Johnny is another story. The widespread filesystem corruption that occurred right before we took him offline cannot be undone, and even though the hardware is operating normally now, Johnny will never be the same again. The databases all seem to be ok, but Apache won't boot up do to thousands of errors in the configuration. The next step will be to try to make backups of everyone's accounts.

HelioHost is doubling our daily memory limit from 100 GB to 200 GB on Johnny and Tommy accounts. Morty accounts will also be able to use up to 200 GB of memory in a day before overage charges begin to get added to the bill. We've had the 100 GB memory limit for a while now, but we think it is time to raise the limit. Most languages are fairly memory efficient, but since we offer Node.js hosting it's nearly impossible to do anything with it, while also staying under the memory limit, because it's so bloated. Ever since we started offering Node.js hosting in 2019 it has basically been a death sentence for any account that tries to use it since it consumes so much memory, and some accounts get suspended after only an hour or two. We are also one of the few free hosting providers that allow long running processes like Discord bots, Telegram bots, and web sockets that can also use a lot of memory too. If you follow our Discord bot guide you end up with an extremely simple Python bot that uses about 50 GB of memory per day, but as soon as you add more features it can easily exceed the old 100 GB per day limit. It's well documented how much we hate Wordpress around here, but we can't deny that it is extremely popular software that a lot of people use. Even with zero plugins you can't get more than about 4k page hits per day before you exceed the old 100 GB limit. Most free hosting providers intentionally set obnoxiously low limits on things like this to force people to upgrade to their paid hosting, but we want our free hosting Johnny plan and donor hosting Tommy plan to be useable, not just schemes to force people to upgrade. Likewise Morty accounts can now use up to 200 GB of memory included in the base $1 per month, before the overage charges of $0.0005 per 1 GB memory begin to accumulate. Let us know if you have any questions.

After about 5 years of using GitBook for our wiki we've decided it is time to move on. We are now using a self-hosted MediaWiki site. The wiki is located at the same URL as it has always been https://wiki.helionet.org but since we just changed the DNS you may continue to see the old GitBook site for up to 4 hours. Let us know if you're interested in editing the wiki and we can create an account for you. Eventually we will offer a self-service way to create wiki accounts and reset wiki passwords, but for now we just want to get the new wiki launched so we don't have to keep two wikis up to date at the same time. We would love to hear any feedback you have on our new wiki.

The Morty server has finally been released for new account signups! If you don't already have an account and want to try out our fastest server, head on over to https://heliohost.org/morty/ to signup. If you already have an account on Johnny or Tommy you can move your existing account to Morty at https://heliohost.org/dashboard/move instead. Only the Morty prepay option is available currently, but we will be releasing the Morty subscription option as well soon. With the prepay option you can make a one-time deposit to increase your Morty balance, and then each day that goes by reduces that balance by $0.0329 as long as you stay under 100 GB memory and 10k CPU usage. If you go over those limits you will be charged for the overage instead of suspended. The overage fee is $0.0005 per 1 GB memory usage and $0.005 per 1k CPU usage. The main advantage of the Morty prepay plan is you can save 16% to 21% over the cost of the subscription plan. With the subscription option, your first month is $1, and then you are charged for any overages at the start of the next month. If you stay under 100 GB memory and 10k CPU every single day you will be charged $1 every month until you cancel. If you exceed those limits you will be charged the same $0.0005 per 1 GB memory usage and $0.005 per 1k CPU on the next month's bill. The main advantage of the Morty subscription plan is you don't have to worry about forgetting to make one-time payments to increase your balance. You can just set it and forget it and your website will stay online as long as the payment continues to go through. Let us know if you have any feedback or questions about our new flagship server.

Here is the final final solution Here is the detail 1. wget --header="TOKEN:secured_token" "http://mbo.helioho.st/cgi-bin/my_script_for_build.py" : this cgi script contains the commands that run "npm install" + "npm run build" 2. touch tmp/restart.txt : after "npm run build" I need to restart the Node JS application, according to Plesk documentation it can be done by creating a file named "restart.txt" in folder "tmp" 3. wget "http://mbo.helioho.st/api/version" : when creating the file "tmp/restart.txt" the server will restart after the next request, that's why I immediately send a request to my application in order it to restart immediately after my new build

Last night Tommy threw a little tantrum because Morty is getting all the attention lately. It's ok, Tommy. We still love you. First the main Tommy IP address stopped routing correctly, then when that was fixed Apache and Nginx broke, and then while we were repairing that MariaDB started having issues as well. Everything should be more or less working now, but there may be a few things you need to do to get your website back online. Known Issue #1) When we run the repair tool on Apache and Nginx it always messes up most of the SSL certificates. This should fix itself after a day or two, but you can speed the process by reissuing the certificate manually. We even have a guide to help you located at https://wiki.helionet.org/common-errors/ssl-certificate Known Issue #2) A lot of the MariaDB passwords and permissions got messed up as well. This is not something that is going to resolve itself. So if you're having trouble connecting to PHPMyAdmin or your website is giving database connection errors you'll need to follow the guide we have located at https://wiki.helionet.org/common-errors/phpmyadmin-mariadb-access-denied Let us know if you notice anything else broken, or you have trouble with either of the guides above.

We are happy to announce that we have now finished moving all of the accounts on our old Tommy server to the newly upgraded server, and will be shutting down the old server soon. If you use our nameservers, your DNS records have been updated to the new server for you and your account was moved with zero downtime, but if you use external DNS, such as Cloudflare, we can't update your records for you. You need to check your email and use the IP addresses that we emailed you on your external DNS provider. If you have been living under a rock, not reading any news posts, ignoring our emails, and haven't updated your DNS records yet, you may have noticed that your website just went offline. This is your final warning: The old Tommy is being retired. We will be deleting the old server in a couple days so make sure you check your account and let us know if anything is missing, didn't get transferred correctly, or if you have any other issues. Let us know if you need help with anything.

Over the last few weeks we've seen a lot of cases of previously low load accounts suddenly getting suspended for high memory usage. Of course, quite a few people have accused us of having inaccurate load monitoring, and we have wasted a great deal of time testing the load monitoring over and over and over and over again. As far as we could see the load monitoring was working perfectly. Since we're going to be launching Morty soon it is very important to us to have accurate load monitoring. Well, we finally figured out the problem. The load monitoring is working perfectly, and since it works so well, it helped us find the actual issue: People's PHP processes aren't always exiting like they should. Normally PHP processes fire up, spit out some website after a few milliseconds, and then hang around for a maximum of 30 seconds or so before their memory is reclaimed by the OS. We've been seeing some PHP processes lock up and continue using memory for over 22 hours. We have already devised and implemented a fix that should make sure this high memory usage doesn't continue, but as always we recommend keeping an eye on your load chart at https://heliohost.org/dashboard/load/ and let us know if anything abnormal is happening. We also recommend taking a look at your web statistics, and blocking any abusive IPs you find. We're also seeing a lot of accounts with 10k to 100k page hits per day from hacker bots, etc. Obviously no human has visited your site ten thousand times in a single day so just block them with .htaccess. We can't block IPs for you because there are legitimate reasons for you to have tons of page hits from a single IP, such as running an API. Let us know if you need help.

thank you heliohost team for your support to us. i am using heliohost since 6-7 years for my small websites. you always give us best hosting services without a single penny. what a dedication. i am very grateful to heliohost team for these fantastic services.you people always support us, even when we did wrong with hosting account. thank you very much

Since Johnny has been rebuilt and seems to be working fairly well, we will be opening free signups once again beginning at midnight UTC tonight, which is roughly 8 hours from now. Sorry again for the long downtime, and be assured we have taken steps to prevent something like this from happening again. Thanks for your patience during this unexpected rebuild.

The scheduled maintenance has finished and Johnny is back online.

thanks!

Thanks for the help guys and sorry for being so dumb ×_×

Hi KazVee, Thank you for your response. Yes, I see it now in Plesk. I'm proud to be a part of this journey. Thanks for the fabulous support as usual and have a great day ahead. Cheerz 🙂

I don't mind giving the extra $1. This is a great service and I'm happy to support it that extra bit!

If you're on the Morty plan you can now see your billing information at https://heliohost.org/dashboard/billing/ This page contains detailed billing information for your account that goes back one year. We keep track of billing charges to one-hundredth of a cent and charge a flat rate of 3.29 cents per day if you don't exceed 100 GB memory and 10k CPU in a day. If you exceed those limits, instead of suspending you, we just charge you $0.0005 per 1 GB and $0.005 per 1k CPU. With the billing page, you can see the exact memory and CPU you used each day, as well as detailed graphs showing what times of the day your website had a lot of load. The billing dashboard is very new so if you see any bugs please let us know so we can get it fixed. If you're not currently on the Morty server and want to check it out, you can move yourself over with this page https://heliohost.org/dashboard/move/ Morty will be available for new signups beginning in a few weeks.

Thanks for reporting it. It should be fixed now.

The API needed for the HelioHost Dashboard still isn't working, and it looks like all SSL certificates were disabled internally again (the repair tool does this as part of a repair, users have to remove and reinstall them to fix it). I reinstalled your cert for you, but until the server is fixed completely and bihourly is running again so Apache restarts, it's not going to take effect.

Yeah, the www record was indeed missing. It's been fixed and the cert has issued successfully.

When I first glanced at this I read joyless trout. Haha. Remote access enabled. host=65.19.154.90 port=5432 username=joyless_user dbname=joyless_tryout password=<set in Plesk>

Now I used the manual password reset link and it works. I can now successfully log in. Thanks for help.

We have added support for Node 23.1.0 to Johnny, Tommy, and Morty. Keep in mind that Node.js uses massive amounts of memory so if you decide to test it out make sure you keep an eye on your load graph at https://heliohost.org/dashboard/load/ All users on Johnny and Tommy are limited to 100 GB memory per day, and if you go over the limit your account will be suspended. On Morty if you go over 100 GB you will have to pay more for your excess load. As always with Node.js websites we strongly recommend following our guides located on our wiki https://wiki.helionet.org/tutorials/node.js because they use Passenger. If you follow Node.js guides from other sites they will likely use more memory over all.

Awesome! Thanks a lot @Unknown025! 🍻

"Smart static files processing" has been disabled on your domain. The setting should go into effect in about 26 minutes. For anyone else who searches and finds this, you can actually turn this off yourself by going to Login https://heliohost.org/login/ > Continue to Plesk > Websites & Domains > [Your domain] > Hosting & DNS > Apache & Nginx > Uncheck the smart static files processing box. Keep in mind changing most settings like this can take up to 2 hours to go into effect. @KazVee Maybe we should add these instructions to the Wordpress wiki?

Thank you very much!

The domain is working for me now. I see what looks to be a soccer (football) website.

You're welcome. We're glad our free hosting has helped you. Your message has been added to our main website.

The Johnny backups should be ready to go. If you created your account before 2024-03-08, and you were on the Johnny server you should be able to go to https://heliohost.org/backup/ to download the best backup we could recover for you. Like we mentioned in a previous news post, anyone who created their account after 2024-03-08 will have to use whatever personal backups you created yourself. Please let us know if anything is missing from your backup, because the server is still powered on so we may be able to find something more for you.

The InnoDB repair script finished last night, and Johnny should be back to normal now. If you're still having problems with your database, or trouble logging in to your Johnny account let us know so we can take a look.

For SVG, you could create a path for each segment of the circle. You'd have to find the start and end coordinates of each segment, and then you'd use elliptical arc path segments: <path d="M START_X,START_Y A RADIUS RADIUS 0 0 0 END_X,END_Y" stroke="blue" /> The example above assumes that the arc is drawn clockwise and is smaller than 180 degrees; the second and third zeroes may have to be changed to ones if either of those assumptions changes for a given arc. MDN has further details on the A path command.

It seems like some IP addresses around the world are being blocked from accessing the servers in our cabinet. If your IP address is affected you will see a timeout error for https://heliohost.org https://helionet.org https://johnny.heliohost.org https://tommy2.heliohost.org and every other server that we own. If your IP address isn’t affected everything will be working as usual. It seems like the IPs are being blocked on our ISP’s level so it’s not something under our direct control. We have contacted our ISP to see if they can fix it. In the meantime if you need to connect to our servers please try switching to another internet connection or using a VPN. We will let you know when everything is working normally again.

We cannot update nameservers on a free subdomain. If you want to use cloudflare then you would need your own domain for that.

We will be performing some database maintenance starting shortly. We expect the service to be restored to normal within a few hours. During the maintenance the main website will show some errors for certain functions, such as logging in. If you need to access Plesk while the main database is down you may do so directly at https://johnny.heliohost.org or https://tommy2.heliohost.org depending on which server you're on.

Sorry should of been more specific. When I said admin I mean the Heliohost admins @Krydos @MoneyBroz @wolstech They have to add it manually. What domain do you want to add? Also what server are you on and what is your username?

Each user can now open a maximum of 10 connections to MariaDB on Johnny and Tommy. Back in 2021 and earlier we had a limit of 3 connections on Johnny and 6 connections on Tommy. Tons of people would write bad code that doesn't ever close database connections and then they would hit the limit and complain to us about the errors. The forum and Discord were full of messages like, "The reason you can't open any new connections is because you already have 6 open connections that have all been sleeping for hours without even doing anything." When we switched to Plesk we decided to do an experiment and leave the connections unlimited to see if people could be responsible and not abuse our generosity. It worked well for 3 years, but in the last 2 weeks one person on Tommy and three people on Johnny have (probably unintentionally) launched a denial of service attack on our MariaDB databases causing hours of downtime for thousands of other users. So, the time has come to enforce a limit again. A few bad people always ruin the fun for everyone else.

I found a huge list of free domains at http://getfreedomain.name/. I'll work through that list some time soon. Conclusion: there are way too many free domain providers.

Hello! There's currently no option for private support of any kind. There's been discussions about offering private support, but if it is implemented, private support will likely be a paid service since it ties up an admin's time and prevents other users from assisting. There is currently no ETA on if or when private support may be offered. When users need to provide details they don't want kept public on the forum forever, I've seen them go back and edit the info out of their posts, once the admins have used it to make whatever changes are needed. Maybe this would work for you as an alternative to waiting for private paid support to be implemented? As for your Cloudflare question, we have a guide here on using CF to manage DNS: https://wiki.helionet.org/Cloudflare_DNS_Records I can't comment if it's easier or not, but I've noticed a few users who were new to DNS management and able to use CF without any problems. It seems pretty straightforward to set up and I believe CF have good help documents if you get stuck. Edit: I didn't see Wolstech had already replied before I typed this up 😄 I'll leave it in case the links are still helpful.

Donations are one-time. If you're looking for a Tommy account, a one-time donation of $1 will get you that. Space upgrades are the same way, they're one time fees. As of now, the only reoccurring fees we charge for services would be for VPSes. The Morty plan will also have such fees once it releases, but this is not available yet. VPS and the Morty plan wouldn't be considered donations though, they're just commercial paid services.

Fantastic. Thank you for the link. I think what makes the most sense is to have my paid domain an alias of my corresponding heliohost.us sub. So: ServerName: waltsblog.com ServerAlias: waltsblog.heliohost.us Or vice versa as per HelioHost architecture That said, the account name is walterpowell. I'll work on the DNS records now. Thanks KazVee

Escalating since I'm not at a PC. Either me or Krydos will get to this for you at some point today.

Since devhamza already got itself suspended for load anyway, I've gone ahead and just unsuspended hamzaatfh and disabled node on it for you so it won't get suspended again. Unsuspended, it may take a little while to work again.

Please try using the reset button to reset your password, or click here: https://heliohost.org/reset/