Hey everyone,
Sorry about disappearing for like four months. Heh. I suppose I'm back now. This should sufficiently explain my absence.
Right, onto more relevant news. HelioHost has been running into some major financial issues as of late. Why?
A few months ago, the number of accounts on Stevie hit a critical mass. With more than 17,000 accounts, he was hosting more accounts than even the heaviest loaded cPanel test servers. The issue with this was that Apache now had to process an absolutely huge configuration file every restart. It took almost a minute to start up. cPanel needs to restart Apache for every new account it creates, which meant that HelioHost had about a minute-long downtime every ten minutes. This was not acceptable.I decided to close signups for the immediate future to at least keep the current accounts stable.
However, this caused yet more problems, this time of a financial nature. With signups closed, HelioHost was taken off all the major free hosting directories, which comprised about 90% of our traffic. Since HelioHost is financed exclusively off of ad revenue generated by our home page, we are now making about 10% of what we used to make. That is not enough to sustain this service.
Options at this point:
Try to prune enough existing accounts to reopen signups. Possibilities to achieve this goal:
Reinstate account auto-deletion script (was taken off due to some problems with the script).Shorten inactivity period required for deletion from three months to one month.Force all existing account holders to request that their account be preserved. Kill all accounts that are not requested to be kept within a month.Try to convert Stevie into eight or more virtual servers. With eight servers, each would host 1/8 the accounts that Stevie does (meaning each would restart eight times faster), and would receive 1/8 the new signups (meaning each would have to restart eight times less often). This would mean a 0.16% downtime for most accounts, instead of the current 10% downtime as a result of opening new signups. Problems with this idea:
Converting Stevie into a virtual server host would be dangerous and difficult. If I screw something up, accounts could be lost.I would have to ship Stevie over to my house again, which would take about $50 for both ways and would cause about a week-long downtime. The biggest problem is that eight cPanel VPS licenses would cost about three times as much as the current single standard license. We don't have the funds for this, as a result.Try to secure financial support of a non-profit nature. Possibilities to achieve this goal:
Try to get somebody to donate a new server. A new server would be able to handle new signups, and as such we could reopen signups. However, a new server would require more cPanel licensing fees and probably more colocation fees. We could also apply point #2 to the new server, but this would require even more licensing fees. Ideal places to ask for free servers: datacenters, hosting companies.Try to get somebody to give us free colocation. Colocation is now taking more money than any other single cost for HelioHost. The best option would be to have colocation in the Seattle area, because this would mean I would be able to service the server more directly. Ideal places to ask for free colocation: datacenters, organizations with datacenters.Try to get somebody to donate cPanel licenses. cPanel licenses are a major cost to HelioHost, especially if want to try point #2. I have asked cPanel for free licenses, but they are not willing to provide us with them because we may be hosting commercial sites. Ideal places to ask for free cPanel licenses: cPanel executives, cPanel license resellers.Try to secure financial support of a for-profit nature. Possibilities to achieve this goal:
Place more intrusive ads on the HelioHost home page.Place more intrusive ads on users' cPanel pages.Ask users to complete surveys when signing up, the profit from which would go to HelioHost.Ask users to join a mailing list when signing up, which would solicit them with offers and advertising. The profits would go to HelioHost.
What are your guys' opinions? Which options make the most sense? Which are the most viable? Let me know what you think.
Thanks,
djbob
