HelioHost

We are currently 100% full on VPS, and we have 28 queued VPS waiting for space to be built. Therefore we have decided that it is time to end the 1 GB free memory sale that we've had going for a while now. That means prices will go back to the normal rate starting at 1 GB memory, 2 CPUs, and 50 GB storage for $4.00 per month which is still a great price. The 10% discount sale for users that sign up for 6 months will continue though.

First of all, we apologize for how long the Plesk transition is taking. We knew up front that it was going to be a lot of work, but it has turned out to be even more work than we expected. Don't worry though, we're not going anywhere, and will be continuing to provide high-quality free webhosting to as many people as we can. We're in the final stages of setting up Tommy, and will begin to transfer accounts soon. In preparation for the start of the transfer we have released a page that should answer the main question that we get, and will continue to get for a while still, which is, "When is my account going to be moved?" https://www.heliohost.org/eta/ To be completely honest, 2021 has been a really rough year for HelioHost, and we're not doing well financially since we lost the licenses for our old control panel. If you are able to support us with a small gift this holiday season we will prioritize your account's transfer to Plesk over those who haven't donated as much. The ETA page above will let you know exactly what position you are in, and how much various donations will benefit you. If you can't donate right now we totally understand, and even the free accounts will be moved as soon as we can. Even just a donation of as little as $1 goes a long way towards keeping us afloat so we can continue to provide free hosting to those who aren't able to even give a dollar. We are a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization according to the United States Internal Revenue Service so any donations are tax deductible, and you can be assured that all the money we receive goes straight towards our mission to provide free hosting to thousands of users around the world. We are counting all donations from one year prior to us losing our old licenses in your total. If your total doesn't look right it might be because you donated with a different email address than you used to create your hosting account. If this is the case please let us know as soon as possible so we can get your donations linked to your account correctly so you can get moved over sooner. We will start out only moving a few accounts each day until we are more sure that everything is working, and then we hope to accelerate the process as much as we can. The ETA page will tell you exactly how many accounts we are currently moving each day so feel free to check it frequently. Let us know if you have any questions. Thanks for being a HelioHost user and sticking with us through this difficult time.

OK I was able to get through the verification step and the following files have been uploaded to my home directory ca_bundle.crt certificate.crt private.key I hope this is all correct. Thank you On Tue, Oct 12, 2021 at 11:28 PM HelioHost Support wrote: > > cPanel has something called AutoSSL that automatically installs > SSL for you. However, when your server doesn't have a license AutoSSL > doesn't work anymore. Plesk has something similar that automatically > installs SSL for you so once your account is moved to Plesk you won't have > to worry about it anymore again. > > > > There should be 2 or 3 files. Generally they're called > private.key, certificate.crt, and ca_bundle.crt. Sometimes the ca_bundle > and the certificate file are combined into one. They might have other file > names, but generally the .key extension and .crt extension will be the > same. Upload what they give you and I can sort it out for you, just don't > upload it to public_html. > > > > You may view the status of your ticket by visiting: > > https://www.helionet.org/index/index.php?showtopic=46185 > > Thank you, > Heliohost support > https://www.heliohost.org/ > https://www.helionet.org/ > >

Thank you again and that all makes sense. I'm working on it now but I'm stuck on a step. I picked zerossl and during the certificate generation process it wants to perform a verification step. It's giving me 3 options but none of them allow me to download the files so I can upload them to my /home/daskiunk space later. [image: image.png] I looked at the HTTP FIle Upload [image: image.png] but it wants me to upload the file to my well-known directory. But you want me to put the files into my .home/daskink so as not to expose the private keys. So I'm not sure what to do for this step. Again apologies but this is my first time through it. Thank you if you can guide me through. On Tue, Oct 12, 2021 at 11:28 PM HelioHost Support wrote: > > cPanel has something called AutoSSL that automatically installs > SSL for you. However, when your server doesn't have a license AutoSSL > doesn't work anymore. Plesk has something similar that automatically > installs SSL for you so once your account is moved to Plesk you won't have > to worry about it anymore again. > > > > There should be 2 or 3 files. Generally they're called > private.key, certificate.crt, and ca_bundle.crt. Sometimes the ca_bundle > and the certificate file are combined into one. They might have other file > names, but generally the .key extension and .crt extension will be the > same. Upload what they give you and I can sort it out for you, just don't > upload it to public_html. > > > > You may view the status of your ticket by visiting: > > https://www.helionet.org/index/index.php?showtopic=46185 > > Thank you, > Heliohost support > https://www.heliohost.org/ > https://www.helionet.org/ > >

Thank you for the quick reply. Sorry if this is a bit ignorant but the SSL certificates have always been auto renewed on Tommy in the past. Is this a change in the process going forward or is it temporary because of the CPANEL to PLESK migration? The reason I'm asking is since I've never had to do it before I want to make sure I handle your request properly. Can you just tell me what files I should expect to get from LetsEncrypt and need to upload to /home/daskunk? I don't want to waste a lot of your time and want to make sure I do it right. Thank you again and sorry that I'm a novice at this. On Tue, Oct 12, 2021 at 10:45 PM HelioHost Support wrote: > > You can generate a new ssl certificate using a free service such > as zerossl, let's encrypt, etc, and then upload the files to /home/daskunk/ > and we can install the certificate for you. Please do not upload the > certificate files to public_html because if you don't keep the private key > private then ssl is pointless. > > > > You may view the status of your ticket by visiting: > > https://www.helionet.org/index/index.php?showtopic=46185 > > Thank you, > Heliohost support > https://www.heliohost.org/ > https://www.helionet.org/ > >

Username: daskunk, Server: Tommy, Main domain: daskunk.heliohost.org Hello Admins My SSL certificate just expired.. All was fine earlier this evening, but now I can no longer access my web site. I'm getting similar messages whether I try to access via my laptop or phone(i.e. multiple different browsers). *Firefox detected an issue and did not continue to daskunk.heliohost.org . The website is either misconfigured or your computer clock is set to the wrong time.* *It?s likely the website?s certificate is expired, which prevents Firefox from connecting securely. If you visit this site, attackers could try to steal information like your passwords, emails, or credit card details.* My domain is daskunk.heliohost.org https://daskunk.heliohost.org/ I'm on Tommy I know you're very busy with the Plesk migration but any help would be very much appreciated. Thank you DaSkunk

The data center visit and hard drive install went great on Monday. Ashoat was at the data center working on the servers for almost 12 hours so everyone give him a big round of applause. Now that the new hard drives are installed and tested we will be moving Johnny to the new drive later today. This means Johnny will be down, likely for several hours, and most of the VPS will experience slower speeds due to the hard drive running at 100% speed copying Johnny over. After Johnny is fully moved and booted back up the newly separated VPS and Johnny should both be quite a bit faster.

Tomorrow, 2021-08-30 starting around 7pm UTC, we will be doing maintenance at our data center which will cause downtime on all of our servers and VPS, including our main website heliohost.org and our forums helionet.org. We estimate the downtime will probably be around an hour for each server as long as we don't run into any significant issues. Our last fundraiser was successful and we are now installing the hardware that we raised the money to purchase. This will increase the performance of Johnny, Ricky, and all of our VPS as well. The fundraiser also paid for network hardware speed improvements which were completed earlier which allows for faster downloads from all of our servers and mitigates the effects of ddos attacks. We will also be installing some hard drives for a new server named Morty that we hope to release in a few months after we finish rebuilding Tommy, Ricky, and Johnny with Plesk.

The first of the Tommy beta test invitation emails have been sent. The invites are being sent to our top donors on the Tommy server whose accounts have properties we want to test with the transfer script. Once all aspects of the transfer script are fully tested we will proceed to transfer all of the accounts. Please check your email in case you have been selected for the beta test.

We've made a lot of progress towards converting to Plesk. Our database which was over 18,000 users has been cleaned up, slimmed down, and restructured in preparation for the upcoming control panel switch. All of the existing archived accounts have been moved from archived state to backed up state. That means that all accounts are now available to download from https://www.heliohost.org/backup/ instead of just the active accounts. Some accounts backup links were changed in this process so if you have a link from a month ago it won't work anymore. If you need to download your backup you can just submit your email address and username again to get the new link. If you're having trouble downloading your backup let us know and we can help. We've also been hard at work converting all of our internal admin tools to support Plesk. In most cases they have to be completely rewritten from the ground up which, as you might imagine, takes quite a bit of time. Some of the code we were using still was written in 2008 so this is a great opportunity to modernize our systems as well. Currently we're still testing the account transfer process from cPanel to Plesk to make sure it works 100% correctly before we start using it on real accounts. We plan to start transferring real accounts, if everything goes well, as soon as this weekend. We'll keep you updated, and when your account is transferred we'll email you to let you know how to log in to Plesk.

We're getting closer to having Tommy ready to begin transferring accounts over. In order to help test the new Plesk server we will be gradually rolling out account transfers through a Tommy beta test. We have made a list of donors from the last year, and those who have donated the most will be getting first access to the new control panel. Things are a little rough around the edges right now, and not all the features that we will eventually offer are ready to go yet though. Tomcat hasn't been installed yet, but we hope to offer Java/JSP service on Tommy again soon. Node.js is already available, as well as PHP 8.0, 7.4, 7.3, 7.2, 7.1, 7.0, 5.6, 5.5, and 5.4. We're really excited to offer the latest PostgreSQL version 13.3 which is a huge improvement over the PostgreSQL 9.2 that cPanel provided. We also have MariaDB 10.6 installed which is a huge upgrade from MySQL 5.7 that cPanel provides. If you're not familiar with MariaDB it's basically what MySQL should have become. The founder of MySQL started the MariaDB open source project when Oracle, a for-profit company, took over control of MySQL. We don't have the DNS situation set up quite yet, as it's going to require a lot of custom code. That means that Tommy users won't be able to add new domains themselves or edit DNS records. That will be fixed eventually. There may also be a lot of other issues that we haven't even discovered yet, and that's why we need brave donors to help test things out for us. If you have any questions about what is available let us know. If you're a donor and don't want to help test the new server quite yet you can opt out by letting us know and we'll transfer you over when things are a little more ironed out. If you're not a donor and you want early access to the Tommy server it's not too late to become a donor either. When your account is transferred you will receive an email explaining how to log in. We're hoping to begin transferring the first accounts in the next week or so. We're just announcing the beginning of the transfer early so people can opt out of the beta test if they want to.

We thought people might be wondering how the transition to Plesk is going so here is an update. We have reduced the size of the Tommy cPanel server from 16 GB of memory down to 10 GB of memory, and created a new Plesk Tommy server with 10 GB of memory. We're going to keep the cPanel version of Tommy running while we continue setting up the Plesk version of Tommy at the same time. Then when the Plesk version of Tommy is ready we will begin moving accounts from cPanel to Plesk with zero downtime. Once all the cPanel accounts are converted into Plesk accounts we will shutdown the cPanel version of Tommy, and increase the memory of the Plesk server to 20 GB. If you have an active account on Tommy you will receive an email when your account is converted to Plesk. Setting up Plesk is taking a little longer than we expected because we're having trouble getting Plesk to interact with our nameservers. None of the DNS extensions we've tried are working, so we're going to write our own extension which will allow Plesk users to be able to add domains, and update their DNS records. Existing accounts can be moved, and we can write a custom script to edit the DNS records of each account when the account is transferred, but until we get this extension written it won't be possible to edit DNS records through Plesk or add new domains without admin assistance. After Tommy is done being converted we will begin work on Ricky which shouldn't take nearly as long because we've already worked through all the Plesk issues while setting up Tommy. Then Johnny will be last to be converted. Just like with Tommy we plan to do zero downtime transfers from existing cPanel to Plesk accounts by running duplicate copies of the servers at the same time. We'll provide more details in the coming weeks. Let us know if you have any questions. Thanks for your patience during this unexpected control panel upgrade.

HostingAdvice.com has written an article about HelioHost. Check it out at https://www.hostingadvice.com/blog/heliohost-offers-free-high-performance-hosting/

Since our shared hosting is being upgraded to Plesk a lot of users are switching to, or considering getting VPS hosting instead. To help give people an idea of what a HelioHost VPS is like we've made a short video which covers the signup process, connecting to SSH for the first time, some basic SSH commands, and how to upload files. Check it out and let us know what you think. If you want to try it out for yourself you can signup for your own VPS at https://www.heliohost.org/vps/ We plan on releasing some more advanced VPS related videos soon. We're also only 9 subscribers away from getting a custom HelioHost YouTube URL so if you haven't subscribed yet please do so. Thanks for being a part of the HelioHost community.

Johnny is now done backing up too, and links to download the full backups are being emailed to all of the active accounts. If you don't get an email for some reason you can download your backup from https://www.heliohost.org/backup/ If you're having trouble downloading your backup let us know and we can help. The backup files contain all of your files, databases, emails, and all of your cPanel settings. If you need any help extracting the information you're looking for from your backup let us know and we can help with that as well. We will be taking Tommy offline before much longer to begin the Plesk installation. Since all the Tommy websites are still online right now we are trying to minimize the downtime by getting everything as ready as possible prior to wiping the server. We're also waiting on Plesk customer support to assist with some of the details of the transition. We'll make another news post when Tommy goes offline.

Tommy and Ricky are both done backing up, and links to download the full backups have been emailed to all of the active accounts. If you didn't get an email for some reason you can download your backup from https://www.heliohost.org/backup/ If you're having trouble downloading your backup let us know and we can help. The backup files contain all of your files, databases, emails, and all of your cPanel settings. If you need any help extracting the information you're looking for from your backup let us know and we can help with that as well. Johnny is now backing up, and we expect that process to take about 3 days to complete. Since Tommy is done backing up we will be taking him offline soon to start installing Plesk.

The backup drive resize on Cody has finished successfully and our main heliohost.org website is back online. Now that we have the space prepared to hold all the backups Tommy is now processing through all the accounts and backing everything up. When Tommy is finished we will make another news post letting you know how you can download your backup. Since the main website is back online you can now signup for a VPS if you want to have a server ready for when we take Tommy offline to rebuild him with Plesk. Let us know if you have any questions.

The Cody server, which hosts our main heliohost.org website, will be down for a bit because we're increasing the size of the backup drive to accommodate the addition of all the Tommy, Ricky, and Johnny accounts that we will be saving into our backup system soon.

Less than 24 hours later we have already managed to negotiate and sign a contract with Plesk that is even better than the one we had with cPanel. It's going to be a lot of work to rebuild everything with Plesk, but in the long run this will be a good thing to get rid of cPanel. Plesk can run on Windows and Linux so we will be able to offer a unified system that includes all of our existing Linux servers as well as our Windows server Lily. Since Lily will have a real control panel it will make it much easier to create an account on her and give easy access to many more people to develop their websites for free using Microsoft's ASP.NET. Plesk is excited to be given the opportunity to supply the control panel that we use to provide much needed assistance to thousands of students, the underprivileged, and small businesses around the world that cannot afford to pay for hosting. Part of the contract includes our permission for Plesk to feature our logo, our mission, and our success stories on their website. Honestly, we couldn't have even hoped for something more perfect than this. It's going to take some time to get everything switched over though. Now that we have a new contract for a control panel our next highest priority will be backing up everyone's account. Then we will wipe Tommy and rebuild him using Plesk, and begin restoring accounts. After that will be Ricky, and Johnny. In the meantime you might consider a VPS to keep your site online using the same domain that you have now. You can find the VPS signup page at https://www.heliohost.org/vps/ Let us know if you have any questions or need help with anything during this painful transition. Thanks for being a member of the HelioHost community.

A few hours ago, with absolutely no prior warning, cPanel unexpectedly revoked all of our licenses, and are now trying to charge us over $17,000 per year to renew them. Obviously since we're a non-profit funded by donations we don't have anywhere near that money to pay their ransom. If you try to log in to cPanel it will give you errors and not let you log in. It looks like FTP is still working though so we strongly recommend you log in and recover your files that way while you still can. We've been a faithful cPanel license holder since 2005, and over the past 16 years we haven't had any issues with them at all until today. Our servers are all inexorably intertwined with cPanel/WHM and all the customizations and systems we've written over the years are worthless without cPanel. We're not entirely sure what we're going to do at this point. EDIT: Please read this next

HelioHost is proud to announce that our Ricky server now has PHP 7.4.21 and PHP 8.0.8 available in addition to the PHP 5.4, 5.5, 5.6, 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3 that we already offered. Johnny only currently support up to 7.3 so if you need 7.4 or 8.0 you'll need to switch to Tommy or Ricky for now. Johnny will eventually receive 7.4 and 8.0 too. As a reminder, we only install PHP extensions as they are needed. If you switch to one of the new versions and it won't run your software because an extension is missing please let us know so we can install it for you. You can check out what is currently installed with these links. https://krydos1.heliohost.org/74/phpinfo.php https://krydos1.heliohost.org/80/phpinfo.php Thanks for being a HelioHost user! Enjoy your cutting edge php.

Our latest YouTube video has been released. This video covers the subject of setting up a discord bot on any of our shared hosting servers for free. We plan on continuing to release new YouTube videos regularly like this to explain how to do various popular things on our service. If you have any suggestions for future videos we'd love to hear your ideas. Anything that confused you while you were learning how to set up your account, or common things that most everyone ends up doing would be great topics to cover. While you're watching the video be sure to click the subscribe button. We're at 74 right now, and if we can get just 26 more people subscribed we can set our channel name to HelioHost instead of that obnoxious string of letters and numbers. Thanks!

https://www.heliohost.org/vps/ Due to the hard drive raid rebuild after the power outage we were forced to close new VPS signups for a while, but now they are reopened with a brand new, hopefully less confusing, signup page. Let us know what you think.

It's time to upgrade the Tomcat version running on Tommy. The 8.5.24 version we're currently running on both Johnny and Tommy was released in 2017 so we're well overdue for an upgrade. The plan is to make a massive jump all the way to Tomcat 10.0. This will likely require a complete rewrite of our custom java management software which might take some time. We plan to start the upgrade process on 2021-07-10 and it may take a week or two to finish. During this time Tomcat won't be available on Tommy. If you have java enabled on your Tommy account you have 3 options: Stay on Tommy and just not have java access until the however long it takes to complete the upgrade. Signup for a VPS where you'll have the entire server to yourself to run java. Transfer your account to Johnny for free so you can continue using java while the upgrade is in progress, and then we can move you back to Tommy for free after the upgrade is done. If we don't hear from you we will assume you want to go with option #1. Java hosting is one of our biggest features, and we're really excited to offer a cutting edge version of Tomcat. Start testing your java applications now on Tomcat 10.0 to make sure you're ready for the upgrade. Johnny will eventually be upgraded to the same Tomcat version as Tommy.

Creating a hosting account at heliohost.org/signup now also creates a matching forum account on the new forum. If you created your hosting account between 2021-06-13 and 2021-07-04 a matching forum account was created on the old forums located at classic.helionet.org. If you created your hosting account between those dates, and want to receive support on the new forums www.helionet.org you'll need to manually create your own forum account.