Krydos

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 website shows as forbidden because you don't have an index file. An example of index file is something like index.html, index.php, etc. As soon as you add an index file the 403 will go away. For example if you access a file directly it displays without issue http://aftersales.sandicliffe.helioho.st/ServiceHours01.html As far as the timeout with your FTP client, the main IP that we used to use was being targeted for attacks, so we null-routed it and moved everyone to temporary IP addresses. Check your FTP client and if it's trying to connect to 65.19.141.77 change it to the IP address listed at the bottom of the Websites & Domains page. Please don't post your temporary IP publicly as the attacker may be reading these forums.

Remote access enabled. host=65.19.154.94 port=5432 username=alamai_admin dbname=alamai_database password=<set in Plesk>

Here is the first sentence on the dashboard if your domain hasn't been fully set up yet (that no one ever reads.)

That was one of the fastest load suspensions we've ever seen. Created your account at 2024-08-06 15:23:29 and suspended at 2024-08-06 18:26:17. Wordpress is insane. You can read all about how much we love Wordpress on our wiki https://wiki.helionet.org/misc/wordpress The section at the bottom about how to reduce Wordpress load may be of interest to you.

Remote access enabled. host=65.19.154.94 port=5432 username=hspierre_invdb_1 dbname=hspierre_invdb password=<set in Plesk>

Softaculous doesn't expire until 2025-03-26. This is likely related to Plesk entering the grace period. We have to contact Plesk every year to renew our licenses. Last year we had to use trial licenses for a few weeks because their legal department was so slow. We just need to wait for Plesk to renew our licenses. I'm going to mark this solved, and if the issue still exists after the licenses are renewed we can revisit it.

Before remote access can be enabled, you need to actually create the database and database user. I see a MariaDB database with the name you listed above. You can enable remote connections yourself through Plesk for MariaDB though so you don't need to contact us for that.

Your VPS has been rebuilt, and your next free rebuild will be available on 2024-09-02. If you need another rebuild prior to that date they can be purchased for $1 each. Let us know if you need help with anything else.

I increased the timeout and it installed.

Once we have spare server space, and signups don't fill in 0.111 seconds we can consider thinking about reviews. I used to read Trustpilot and review sites about HelioHost, and I found one review that was a blatant lie on Trustpilot. I contacted Trustpilot support and provided proof that the review was a lie. They refused to take the review down even with proof that they were lying, so whatever. When you read reviews you have to keep in mind that most "loud" people that are complaining are idiots and liars. Also we get contacted all the time by people offering to write good reviews for us if we pay them, so you can't trust the good reviews and you can't trust the bad reviews either. Whatever. Regardless of what the reviews are saying people are knocking down our doors to get free hosting, and a surprisingly large number of people are willing to donate to us too. We must be doing something right if we've stayed in business through thick and thin for 18 years.

SPF, DKIM, and DMARC have been set up for you, but since you're using Cloudflare you'll need to copy over the values yourself, or switch to our nameservers. _dmarc 14400 IN TXT "v=DMARC1; p=quarantine" _domainkey.plj.my.id. 14400 IN TXT "o=-" default._domainkey.plj.my.id. 14400 IN TXT ( "v=DKIM1; k=rsa; p=MIIBIjANBgkqhkiG9w0BAQEFAAOCAQ8AMIIBCgKCAQEAw61mZ5OtEYgouyvNbdLO6gD2qyQiqN3WV0i8DrobORRCktp4shtyJuOxfpzsA6/L36hm/uEf5OW+xb5w3LtxoXddQM/k7lisFsp4QUhP4dVg1ZFmc5VE7uJhqjJFIcQGeFdjIieX7a4HDHZnsYUlyNH/4llUn7qn/83lyW99yeWae6f9bpVf3rcTJnmL3tZMj" "9Wyj+ARKbVfApETdG6IB/Ymj3edA/vEsonx68z12d4M4D72vago/SF3+2465GgBz+aKIGHFNzK9P4S/8I1hAUYLxeUDJilxyhj4grVoffpXYQtbGemkIpnATFmmhN0dICmh+PZ6FstEO4Z8/dHxNQIDAQAB;" )

Hestia has been installed on your VPS. You can find the default username, and password in the file /root/hestia.txt The URL to login is https://vps103.heliohost.us:8083/ The server that you're on is a little overloaded right now due to us moving a lot of stuff off of Sparkie for the raid rebuild. If you find your VPS a little slow let us know and we can move you to a faster server.

The great thing about storage space upgrade donations is even if you don't really need it right now, it's always there available for you to use someday in the future if you do suddenly need it. Thanks.

You can upgrade your VPS at https://heliohost.org/dashboard/upgrade/ Basically what it does is calculate your current daily rate, and your remaining balance. Then it calculates the upgraded daily rate, and sees how many days worth of credit you have left. Then it gives you x number of "free" days because you already paid for them with the previous subscription, and then sets up a new subscription that starts on the day that your already-been-paid-for-days ends. It's a lot of math, and I'm glad I don't have to calculate it all manually anymore.

Also, this should be common sense, but you never need to post your password. Admins will never need or ask for your password, and anyone who does ask for your password is just trying to steal your account.

You single handedly caused the load to spike from 10-15 to over 100, caused 48 minutes of downtime of Tommy, and dropped our weekly uptime from 99.51% to 99.00%. The goal for Tommy is to keep the uptime above 99.50%. So I'll give you 3 options: Wait until the weekly uptime is higher than 99.50% again, and then you can have your account unsuspended. This might take a week or two, it's hard to predict. Switch to a VPS to get your account back online immediately, and we'll credit the $1 you donated for your Tommy account towards the first month of the VPS. So if you get a Mercury VPS it will only cost you $3 for the first month instead of $4. Wait for Johnny to be rebuilt. The goal on Johnny is to keep the uptime above 97% so there is more leeway for mistakes in your code. This may or may not happen faster than option 1 so I listed it as a possibility.

Byron is still around, but doesn't help out on the forums anymore because he's too busy to keep up with all the changes. I just talked to him a couple days ago, and he's doing great. He believes in this non-profit organization so much that he's set up a recurring donation of $10 per month to help us out. Ashoat is still around. I just talked to him the other day too. He runs all of our bank accounts, and helps keep track of the money. He's also the chairman of the board so he's in charge of running the board meetings. Ashoat is also our main in-person tech that installs all the new servers, and handles all the in-person hardware stuff. Just because they don't post on the forum doesn't mean they died or anything. The funny thing about volunteers is they don't have to work if they don't want to. They help out ...... voluntarily.

Johnny is still fully free. Are you saying we shouldn't ask for donations or have a VPS service? Did you know that from 2015 to 2019 we lost $11,247.69? The only reason we're still able to offer any free hosting is because we started asking for donations, and finding ways to offer extremely affordable hosting. I guess you'd rather us stay FuLLy fReE and have gone out of business years ago, huh? Go ahead and start your own free webhosting company that loses almost $3000 per year. See how well that goes. Ok, so someone walks up to you and says, "I want the keys to the safe. I'm your new employee." You just hand over all the passwords and bank accounts? People need help. Who are going to help them other than the admins? If we had a whole staff of admins that never helped anyone do you know how bad HelioHost would be? The stuff in this topic makes zero sense to me.

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.

Yep literally everyone else has noticed it too. That's why we mentioned it in a news post.

Since you created your account after March 8th there is no data for you on the server. You'll have to rely on the backups that you made yourself.

Since you haven't read any of our news posts, it's probably safe to assume that you haven't read the first sentence on our homepage either. HelioHost is a non-profit powered by volunteers. That means we all have full time jobs, and lives outside of HelioHost. We're all volunteers which means we don't get paid for the work we do here to keep this hosting service running. We volunteer our time because we believe in HelioHost's mission to provide free hosting. Personally, over the last two weeks since we took Johnny offline to try to repair the raid array I've volunteered over 70 hours trying to fix HelioHost. Several days in there I got only 3-4 hours of sleep trying to get it fixed as quickly as possible. This is on top of having a full time job, and family, and life outside of HelioHost. Plus on top of all that I'm moving to a new house, and I need to have the old place empty and clean before August 1st. My life is insanely busy right now, so it really offends me for you to impatiently say The other staff members have been super helpful too helping out any way they can, but I don't know exactly how many hours they've volunteered, but it's all a lot more than usual. We volunteer because of the people who appreciate our hosting service, not people like you.

Too bad there's not a place where users can go to read all the news about Johnny to let everyone know what is going on, and keep them updated on what the next steps will be. Oh wait, there is! https://helionet.org/index/forum/1-news/ I'm so disappointed that you didn't know about the news that is posted on our forum, RSS feed, one our homepage, on the signup page, on Facebook, on Twitter, on Discord, and on our status page. We've had some people complain that we post too much news, but we told them that even though we post so much news and let everyone know what is going on constantly, people like @djnevilmorgan still refuse to read it. You created your account on 2024-06-28 and we already posted in the news that we couldn't get backups of anyone who created their account after March 8th, so you'll have to use the backups that you created yourself. If your time is so "valueble" and you are depending on your data you should know that you should take frequent backups yourself. Any backup system, no matter how redundant, can fail. I mean our datacenter could catch on fire and burn down, and any number of redundant backups could all be destroyed. That's why we have it in our terms of service that you are responsible for creating your own backups.

We will be rebuilding Johnny, and then you can restore your backup on to the new Johnny. If you don't want to wait for that to happen you can donate $1 to immediately get an account on Tommy, or you can get a VPS immediately for $4 per month. We will also be releasing the Morty server soon as well. After Johnny is rebuilt, if you try to login or reset the password of an account that was on Johnny, but was deleted due to the rollback or the rebuild, you will be sent an invite to recreate your account without needing to contact an admin, or wait until the free signup period at midnight or noon UTC.