Krydos

https://www.heliohost.org/backup/

Generally we try to provide free hosting to as many people as possible. Why provide free hosting to only 5 Wordpress users when we can provide free hosting to 500 non-Wordpress users that cause the same amount of load?

Tommy is working right now. If you had an account on Tommy your website is still online. In order to install Plesk though we're going to have to wipe the server and reinstall the operating system. During that time Tommy accounts will be offline. We've never built a Plesk server before so it might take quite a while due to having to rewrite a lot of our internal tools as well. We're hoping we can have Tommy back online within a month.

I did a spam test on the email before I sent it and one of the warnings I got was about the phrase "trying to charge us over $17,000 per year to renew them." It ranks pretty high on spam filters because it mentions of a large sum of money. Normally I rewrite my emails to avoid triggering spam tests like this, but there really isn't any way to explain cPanel's hijacking and ransom request without emphasizing how much they're trying to charge us to get our servers back. Also, for what it's worth, I have an account with a Hotmail email address and I received the email just fine so it's not like all Hotmail/Microsoft emails were flagged as spam.

Of course. I'll start building your VPS in a bit and email you the credentials to log in. Yeah, it's not hard at all. It just takes 2 commands: wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hestiacp/hestiacp/release/install/hst-install.sh This wget command saves the Hestia installer to your VPS. bash hst-install.sh --interactive no --email email@domain.tld --password p4ssw0rd --hostname hostname.domain.tld -f And that command runs the installer. Just change your email address, password, and hostname. Then it just runs for 15 minutes or so installing everything it needs and then it gives you the login url and asks you to reboot the VPS.

The main reason we choose Plesk is because it can be installed on our Linux servers as well as our Windows server. We've had a Windows server for a few years, but hardly anyone uses it because there is no control panel and all of the accounts on it have to be created manually. By having the same Plesk control panel on all of our servers we'll be able to seamlessly connect them all together and easily create accounts and manage them all. As far as the price, we applied for the non-profit discount that Plesk offers and they approved us, on the condition that they be allowed to feature our story and put our logo on their main website. Obviously we agreed because that will be a great way for even more people to find out about HelioHost. The deal that Plesk is offering us is much better than the deal we had with cPanel. We will continue to be able to offer free hosting on Tommy, Ricky, and Johnny just like we have been doing for years. You can try out Plesk on their demo site https://docs.plesk.com/try-plesk-now/ We will be using the WebHost edition not the WebPro. The links there log in to the admin control panel that normal users won't have access to, but through that admin panel you can create a user account for yourself and log in to that to see how it will look. We're really excited to switch control panels, and Plesk was our first choice. We've been looking at it for years ever since we set up our Windows server, but it was always too daunting of a proposition to try to convert everything from cPanel to Plesk. Now that cPanel has forced our hand we can finally do the upgrade like we've always wanted to. It's just really unfortunate that our users will have to suffer for a while because of how evil cPanel is.

I talked to two different people at cPanel and they gave me the same response. Basically they just said we could pay full price which is over $17,000 per year if we wanted to get our servers back.

Yeah, and the worst part is cPanel gave us absolutely no warning. They didn't even email us saying "You're licenses have been revoked." A user tried to login to cPanel and got an error message and reported it to us is how we found out. Completely ridiculous, and very unprofessional behavior. They obviously just got too greedy and decided to try to hijack our servers for ransom money.

The domain abbodmar.heliohost.us now points at your VPS, and Hestia has been installed. Let us know if you need help with anything else.

I installed Hestia, and restored your Tommy backup on to your VPS. I sent you an email from my personal address with the credentials to log in to Hestia. Let us know if you need help with anything else.

Yes, all of our cPanel servers, Tommy, Ricky, Johnny, Cody, and Brody, have had their licenses revoked. We aren't able to provide any kind of free shared hosting right now. All of the VPS subscriptions are unaffected though.

Which folder?

We'll try to get the servers functional as soon as possible.

Changed.

No, you don't. You can use any DNS service you want for your VPS. Actually right now I recommend using external DNS such as through Cloudflare or through your domain registrar. Both of our nameservers run cPanel too so they will need to be rebuilt which means we will have some downtime on our nameservers as well over the next couple weeks.

You were sent an email. Perhaps check your spam folder? If it's not there complain to Comcast I guess.

We really do think this will be a good thing in the long run. It's a lot of work for now, and it's really unfortunate that cPanel did this to all of our users with no warning, but I think we'll come out of this bigger and better than ever.

Thanks for being so understanding.

You're welcome.

Thanks!

Only active accounts were added to the backup database. Since his account was archived before cPanel revoked the licenses it wasn't added automatically. I emailed you the link.

In the next day or so we will be taking your server, Tommy, offline to rebuild it. Redirects won't even work, and neither will email. If you don't switch to a VPS or find another hosting provider your domain will timeout in the browser, and all your emails will bounce back to the senders.

Your site will remain online without access to cPanel until we need to take that server down to rebuild it. So Tommy will be taken down soon, probably today or tomorrow. Once Tommy is done Ricky will be next, and after that Johnny. We've never installed Plesk before and a lot of our internal tools will need to be rewritten to work with Plesk so it may be a few weeks that your site is offline. We're hoping to have Tommy back online within a month.

Thanks for being so understanding. You rock!

One of the clauses in the contract I signed with Plesk stipulates that they have to give us 30 days prior written warning if they want to revoke our licenses. They seem really excited to supply the non-profit licenses for us though so that probably won't happen.