HelioHost

Johnny is now booting back up, and all services should be back online and performing normally within a few hours. Our apologies for the extended downtime. It turned out that the issue was one that couldn't be fixed remotely, and required interaction with the physical server. During the process of fixing Johnny it was also required to take Cody offline for a few minutes. As usual accounts located Stevie were not affected by any of this.

There have been complications getting Johnny back online and functional. We're working as quickly as possible to get the situation resolved. Further updates will be provided as they are available.

There was a problem with the server that Johnny is hosted on. This resulted in quite a bit of downtime for users who have their accounts located on this server. Stevie accounts were unaffected. The problem has been fixed and Johnny is now in the process of booting up. We expect service to return to normal shortly. Thank you for your patience.

The Johnny server has crashed due to high load. He is rebooting and we'll have him back online as soon as possible. Sorry for any inconvenience due to this unexpected downtime.

The latest version of Python 3.4.1 which was released about a month ago on May 18th 2014 has been installed on Johnny for all Heliohost accounts to use. The release notes and changelog can be found at https://www.python.org/download/releases/3.4.1/ If you're interested in using this new version of Python in your scripts be sure to use the shebang #!/usr/local/bin/python3.4 to access it. As always if there is a feature you need or an upgrade to your hosting don't hesitate to ask on our support forums located at http://helionet.org/

Please join us in congratulating Yashrs as the newest member of the Heliohost staff.

The Stevie server is now back online after some downtime this morning.

It appears as if the crash on Stevie has caused some Mysql issues for some people. If your database uses the InnoDB engine, then it is probably in read-only mode for the time being. This means that you can probably run most select queries, but if you try to insert, update, delete, etc to change the database it will return an error such as ERROR 1030 (HY000): Got error -1 from storage engine This read-only access will allow you to make backups of your data if you need to through cPanel. Keep in mind that we always strongly recommend users to take frequent backups of all of their data. We also recommend using a database engine that is more reliable. While we are in the very time consuming process of fixing all of the errors in all of the databases on Stevie that the crash created you may also see intermittent connectivity issues even on non-innodb databases. These should resolve themselves quickly, and we will do out best to minimize database downtime. If you have any issues with MySQL on Stevie please post them in this customer service thread http://www.helionet.org/index/topic/18427-stevie-mysql-issues/ Creating multiple identical or similar threads will just be merged. Thank you for your patience during this crash recovery period.

Sorry for the downtime folks. Stevie is now back online and fully functional.

For some unknown reason Stevie server has crashed. The datacenter technician has been contacted and the server seems to be booting back up alright. For now it's a bit of a mystery why the server went down in the first place. There wasn't high load, no one was abusing the server, there doesn't appear to have been anyone attacking Stevie, or anything else like that. The crash might be because of the recent server move. Perhaps a power fluctuation in the new location or something. We'll get it back online as soon as possible.

The temperamental Johnny server is now once again online and fully functional. Hopefully the recent changes made during the downtime will allow this run to be a little longer than the last. All services are now online on all servers and Johnny is working his way through his renew, create, and delete queue. Go go, Johnny, go. You can do it little buddy. No more crashes, ok?

Johnny has crashed again due to VM errors. This time a new VM has been created with identical settings, and all of the existing Johnny partitions and all of the data on them are being transferred over to the freshly created VM. This should resolve the corruption on the old VM that has been causing these crashes. This process will take some time to complete, but we'll have Johnny back online as soon as possible.

All servers are now online and all services offered are now fully functional. Johnny has a bit of a backlog of new accounts to work through, but he's chugging through the process as quickly as he can. You can expect a few more load spikes than normal while the dust of the downtime settles, but everything should now be returning to normal.

Johnny has been online for 90 minutes now, and everything seems to be working again. Obviously there was some complications during the reboot, but it seems like all of the VM issues have been resolved now. Basic services on Johnny are now online, and the high load services are being brought up in a staggered delay to try to minimize load during this reboot. Apache (http) should be up soon, followed by Tomcat (java), InnoDB (mysql), account deletion, and new account creation after that. Basic MySQL functionality, ftp, cpanel, mail, etc are already online. Once again sorry for any inconvenience, and thank you for your patience during this process. Another news post will be made once Johnny is fully functional and all services are again online.

Johnny froze up this morning due to a VM error. We were able to get him unfrozen and shut down cleanly. After the system finishes some diagnostic scans we'll have him back online again as soon as we can. Thanks for your patience.

http://wiki.helionet.org/Java_Servlet Check out our new Java tutorial for creating a simple Hello World servlet and deploying it on your Heliohost account. One of the most exciting, unqiue, and desired features that Heliohost offers is Java/JSP support for free on the Johnny server. After waiting for over a month for Java to be enabled on their account, many users have a lot of questions on how to get started with Java servlets and JSP. While JSP is fairly straight forward to figure out, getting a Java servlet deployed successfully on Heliohost can be confusing for a lot of users even if they've developed in Java for years. Now we have a comprehensive tutorial taking you through all of the steps so anyone can have a functional Java servlet deployed quickly and easily as soon as Java is enabled on your account.

Johnny is once again fully functional. As usual after a reboot the server will be a little extra unstable and prone to high load spikes for a while until the dust settles. The Heliohost staff is already looking into and implementing new systems that should help prevent this from happening again in the future. Prior to the Johnny crash two weeks ago this server had run without a single reboot for nearly a year. While Johnny is our experimental and consistently less stable server, crashing every couple weeks is not acceptable. Our apologies for any inconvenience this downtime may have caused you.

It looks like Johnny has crashed again. We'll have him back up and running as soon as possible.

Our account status script has been updated to provide users with a lot more useful information to find out what is going on with their account. Previously the script was useful only for users who had signed up for a new account but were still waiting for the account to be created. Since previous upgrades to our system have sped up the account creation process, new accounts on Johnny are generally created in a few minutes, and account on Stevie rarely take more than a few hours to create it was a mostly useless script. Now the script, in addition to letting you know what number in line you are to have your account created, will tell you if your account is active, inactive, suspended, or doesn't exist at all. Check it out over at http://www.heliohost.org/home/support/scripts/status

The reboot process on the Johnny server is now complete, and all services are online. We staggered the boot up of various high load processes to make the reboot a little smoother, but accounts located on this server can expect spikes of high load for a while longer.

The Johnny server has crashed due to high load. The server is now rebooting and during the boot up process we will also be doing some diagnostic scans of the system. The server will be back online as soon as possible.

The planned cPanel downtime on the Stevie server is now complete. All services are now back online and fully functional. Our cPanel licenses on all servers should be far more reliable now. Thank you for your patience during this upgrade.

Over the next couple days we will be transitioning the Stevie server from a cPanel distributor license to a cPanel direct license. The reason we are doing this is because the distributor we were purchasing our licenses from is no longer reliable which resulted in multiple unexpected cPanel downtimes on Johnny even though we had paid our bills. To prevent this from happening again we are taking our business elsewhere for all of our license purchases. Once our existing license expires there will be a short time where cPanel will not be accessible, but we will quickly get the new license installed. During this time all websites and all services should continue operating as normal, and only cPanel itself will be temporarily offline. Visitors to your sites should see no difference at all, and this should only effect admins who have access to cPanel so plan accordingly. Another news post will be posted once this process is complete.

Please join me in congratulating the newest member of the Heliohost support staff, wolstech. We get the question quite often, "How do I get promoted?" and the answer is actually quite simple: Just help people. That's exactly what wolstech has done. At Heliohost we have a different business model than most companies. We believe in building and strengthening our community by encouraging users to assist each other with questions and problems. Not only does it free up the admins to spend their time working on bigger issues, but it also promotes a great atmosphere of learning and helping each other. You may think you already know a lot about servers, websites, and computing in general, but it's amazing how much more you can learn trying to help others with their seemingly easy problems. After proving himself by helping numerous people on the forums wolstech drew the attention of the existing moderators and administrators of Heliohost. After some internal discussion we offered him the position and he accepted. Congratulations wolstech, it's because of users like you that makes Heliohost great, and ensures that this free service will exist for many years to come.

Last night at 10:43pm PST the Stevie server crashed and began an unexpected downtime. We are happy to report that the server is back online and once the boot up process is complete all services should be online once again. A full file system scan was executed and there doesn't seem to be any data loss for any user accounts. Our apologies for the inconvenience this downtime may have caused you.