HelioHost

cPanel on Johnny is now licensed and functional again. We switched license providers so this should never happen again. Sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

It looks like the cPanel license on Johnny has expired again, which is interesting because we paid our license payment. The last time this happened back in July we threatened our license provider that if it happened again we would move to a more reliable provider. We are going to get Johnny cPanel back online as soon as possible, and unless our currently license provider has some really compelling reasons we're going to be taking our business elsewhere. In the meantime all Johnny websites and services other than cPanel should be online, and all Stevie services are working as normal. Sorry for the inconvenience of not being able to access Johnny cPanel for the moment.

Cpanel and everything else on the Johnny server should now all be working.

We are aware of the cPanel license issues that are occurring on Johnny. This same exact thing actually already happened once last month in June. The cause is the company that we buy our cPanel licenses through is having issues keeping the Johnny server license online, but they aren't having any issues with Stevie. We don't understand, and haven't received an explanation as to why this is. When this happened the first time a temporary one month solution was set up to get the server back online and fully functional as quickly as possible. This allowed us 30 days to speak with our licensing company to make sure this wouldn't happen again in the future. They assured us that it wouldn't. Unfortunately it did happen again, but once again we reiterate that this has nothing to do with Heliohost. All of our bills are paid, especially and including the Johnny cPanel license, and we are working as quickly as possible to get all services back online as soon as possible. As you might be able to imagine, we are strongly considering switching our cpanel licensing provider, but we've been using this same provider for over eight years now and we've never had any problems before the two times in the last two months. Most services on Johnny should still be online and functional, such as, http, ftp, etc. so users should be able to update their sites and take backups through ftp if they want to. Stevie users aren't affected at all by this downtime. Thank you for your patience during this process.

Django, the high-level Python web framework, is now installed and working again on the Johnny server. A few months ago it was brought to our attention that Django was no longer working correctly on the Johnny server. Django service continued uninterrupted on Stevie, and users requiring the use of django were encouraged to move or create their accounts on Stevie instead. Now you can once again use either server to host your Django powered websites. If you're not familiar with django we recommend you visit their website https://www.djangoproject.com/ and check it out. Heliohost is proud to be one of the few free webhosts in the world to offer support for this powerful and exciting framework. If you're interested in setting up django on your account you can follow our guide located here http://www.heliohost.org/home/features/languages/python Stevie is currently running Django 1.3.0 on Python 2.7.1 and Johnny has been upgraded to Django 1.3.7 on Python 2.7.4. We are already looking into the possibility of upgrading to Django 1.5+ but it will take significant server reconfiguration to make that possible. Watch out for that upgrade in the near future.

Greetings early birds. Today marks the beginning of the voting process for the website competition, currently there are 65 complete entries, thus, you lucky folk and any of your users you send to the voting booth will have to sort through 65 ballots. This is a nice jump in entries since last time, but we're likely to be seeing some pruning as the month goes on. We ask that you take the time to pay your colleagues' sites a little visit, maybe after the voting concludes you could even ask how they got such smooth layouts or what scripts they're running. Simply put, winners will be decided based on the highest average cummulative points; you get graded on a scale of 1 to 5 on 3 categories, this gets summed and divided by the amount of votes you get. This prevents abuse by a larger userbase swarming to give their webmaster a huge score relative to a small, but loyal, userbase only capable of voting a few times for their webmaster. While you go through your colleagues' work we ask that you keep an eye out for and report rulebreakers and sites with malicious content. To maximize voting we also ask that you place a notice of some sort on your site linking to http://heliohost.org/home/website-contest, the more people that you get voting the better your odds are at winning. Report bad contestants on this thread or PM Shinryuu if you wish to remain anonymous. There is no key required to take this survey so anyone and everyone is welcome to participate. Good luck goes out to the 65 contestants. - HelioHost Staff

If you're interested in doubling your account's storage space from 500 MB to 1 GB don't forget to enter our third annual Heliohost website contest. Not only that but you will also receive a custom Helionet forum title of your choice. To enter your website hosted on Heliohost servers simply visit http://heliohost.org/home/website-contest and fill out an entry form. There are only four days left to enter so if you've been putting it off now is the time to get your entry in.

We are pleased to announce that Johnny is now running rails version 2.3.18, which is the latest and greatest version that cPanel supports. In the past we have experimented with rails 3+, but we found that most users were unable to use this version because it was too complicated to set up. By continuing to use rails 2.3.* accounts which are located on the Johnny server can follow the simple instructions for setting up a Ruby on Rails application http://wiki.helionet.org/Deploying_a_Rails_application_on_HelioHost located on our wiki. During the update process there was a small temporary amount of functionality loss. Existing, running RoR apps continued to work as expected, but any new applications that were created failed to start without displaying any errors. Since there was no error messages the problem was difficult to diagnose, but the issue has now been located and fixed so now new applications can be started once again. If you're still having any issues creating new RoR applications let us know by starting a new topic in our customer service forum http://www.helionet.org/index/forum/45-customer-service/

It looks like the measures taken yesterday helped, but not enough. Stevie will be back up as soon as possible.

At roughly 12:40am PDT Stevie experienced a high load event which caused the entire server to become unresponsive. A reboot request was sent to the data center housing the Heliohost servers, and within ten minutes a technician physically restarted the server. The subsequent several hours of downtime are the result of an extensive battery of diagnostic tests and scans to make sure that everything is still in full working order. The result of the tests indicate that no data was lost, and all systems are in perfect condition. The post crash investigation has been completed and the cause of the downtime has been determined. Improvements and updates to our automated systems are already in the works to help detect another similar high load event at an earlier point in the process, and prevent our servers from becoming totally unresponsive again. Please accept Heliohost's sincerest apologies for this unexpected downtime, and any inconvenience this downtime may have caused you or your site visitors.

The MySQL storage engine InnoDB is back online on the Johnny server. Thanks to the hard work of the Heliohost administrators this appears to be the last broken remnant from the high load induced crash that Johnny experienced during the wee hours of the morning of March 25th http://www.helionet.org/index/topic/15338-johnny-reboot/ If your website uses InnoDB databases we strongly encourage you to convert to the default engine MyISAM as this database engine performs much better in the case that Johnny crashes again. We will do everything in our power to prevent another crash like this from happening again, but unless you require any of the features specific to InnoDB it might be wisest to convert. If you are still experiencing any InnoDB related issues on the Johnny server please let us know by posting on this thread http://www.helionet.org/index/topic/15359-solved-johnny-innodb/ or starting a new topic, but at this time it looks like everything is working fine. The best news of all is it doesn't look like there was even any data loss for any website located on Johnny.

As a follow-up, registration is now open for the HelioHost website competition. Site registration, and later voting, will be done in the form of a survey, powered by LimeSurvey. To register your website you'll need to first register to take the survey, you'll receive an email with the link to the survey which consists of 3 questions, the same information required for a customer service request, username, server, and domain name. Once that's provided and you save your responses you are officially entered. Judging criteria and rules are explained in the survey so please do not rush to get to the juicy bits and read every page thoroughly. The survey starts at midnight and ends on midnight going into May 1st, at which point you'll have a new survey for judging websites. Judging will take place over a week or two's time, depending on voting patterns and the volume of sites registered. You can go ahead and register for the survey now, and take it later once it opens or whenever it's most convenient, at http://heliohost.org/home/website-contest -HelioHost Staff

All services on Johnny are now back online and fully tested. It seems that the unexpected crash of the Johnny server a few days ago caused problems with the apache and mysql configurations which didn't manifest until later. Apache has now been completely rebuilt from the ground up, and mysql is online but any databases which use the InnoDB engine are still offline at this time. The Heliohost staff are working to see if InnoDB access can be restored, or if not whether the databases can be converted.

Apache on Johnny seems to have a configuration error that is preventing it from starting up properly. The problem has been identified, and a new configuration build is already in progress. Once the build is complete we hope to have Johnny back online as soon as possible. This downtime only affects http connections. Other services such as FTP, cPanel, web disk, mail, etc should all be functioning normally.

The Johnny server is now back online, and all websites hosted on Johnny should also now be online. Prior to this crash Johnny was online for 125 days straight. Hopefully it will be even longer than that before the next time he needs to go offline. As usual, load levels have a tendency to be rather high after a reboot so please be nice to Johnny for a while until all the dust settles.

Last night Johnny crashed during his nightly maintenance due to excessive high load. The server has been restarted and is currently doing a full system scan. Once the scan has completed Johnny should be back online as soon as possible. Apologies for the inconvenience of this additional downtime.

For the last twelve hours or so, users whose accounts are located on the Stevie server may have noticed some slow page loading and timeouts. There is nothing wrong with the Stevie, but rather a website hosted on this server suddenly became very popular mostly with folks from Italy. When our servers start getting this much traffic we begin making obscene amounts of money from it, so it's always a bit of a tough decision to shut the site down completely. We've been fine tuning the settings and it looks like we may have found a balance that minimizes the disturbance to other sites hosted on the same server. Since the cause of the slowdown originates in Italy should we make a pope joke, or should we make a mobster joke? It's probably best to not make any jokes since the site that became so popular sells concrete shoes, and the Vatican is obviously stocking up for the new papacy... Oh, I guess we went with both. Forget about it.

We've noticed quite a few users creating more than one account recently. Just to refresh your memory, our terms state that each user is allowed one account, and our policy for dealing with multiple accounts belonging to one user is that all involved accounts will be suspended. Each account that is created on Heliohost must read the bright red text "Only one account is allowed per user." It's directly above the button labeled "Create Account." It's really hard to miss. We do offer several valid reasons to have more than one account, but all users with more than one account must first ask permission to have more than one account on our forums http://helionet.org/ If a member of the Heliohost staff agrees that you have a legitimate reason for multiple accounts, then you will be granted permission and you can sleep easy knowing that you won't suddenly be suspended. If you are one of the many people out there that already have more than one account you have three options: Choose one account and use the deletion script http://www.heliohost.org/home/support/scripts/delete on the rest. Apologize for your inability to read and/or follow the rules, and belatedly ask permission. Spend your days and nights looking over your shoulder constantly like a hunted animal knowing that at any moment all of your accounts could suddenly become suspended for breaking the rules. Obviously option three is the logical choice. Another thing to keep in mind is that even if you only own one account yourself it might appear that you have more than one if your family members, coworkers, fellow students, etc all have accounts too. In this case it's probably better to be safe than sorry, and you could post on the forums requesting that your accounts be immune to the multi-account detection systems.

Yup, you read that right, it's time for another website competition. As it's been nearly a year since the last competiton here at HelioHost, we've decided it's about time we got rolling with another. Now, for those of you who don't know, the rules of the game are simple, to qualify for a contest entry you need to have your site hosted on HelioHost, and abide by our standard Terms of Service. Breaking either of these rules will result in an instant disqualification from the contest, and breaking the second clearly leads to a suspended account, which nobody wants. You can create a brand new website just for the purpose of the competition or if you think one of your current sites is your swan song, feel free to let the whole of HelioHost bask in it's glory. The purpose of the competition is to let yourselves be free to try new things and see how you stack up with your colleagues. Winning gives you bragging rights and feels awesome, but don't think that's all you'll get for being top dog. The winnder of the competition will also receive a customized Forum title on HelioNet, what this means is that instead of "Rank <roman numeral> Member" above your HelioNet profile image, it will display whatever you feel like having us put there . And as if that wasn't enough, we're also throwing in 500 MB of extra space on the winning account, that's 1GB of total storage for all your webpages plus whatever else you feel like storing, it's your space, use it however you want (as long as it doesn't break the ToS). We hope many of our 25k users will register their sites to be judged, and we hope that any users that enter enjoy themselves while working on their websites and learn something new in the process. Here at HelioHost we're all regular users who help out other users any chance we get, just because we're competing against each other that philosophy won't change, so if you run into problems trying to make your site "perfect", don't hesitate to post on our Website Management or Questions forums. You may notice I haven't said anything about where to register, or how websites will be judged yet. This is because registration will not begin until April 1st, this is just a heads up to all potential contestants to get their creative juices flowing. Information on the registration process and judging criterion will be posted mid-March to give you guys time to brainstorm ideas. Feel free to discuss the competition and what else you'd like as a potential prize.

For about eight hours last night and early this morning websites hosted on Johnny may have experienced slow loading or timeouts. There is nothing wrong with the server or your account, but rather a site we hosted became very popular in China. Thousands of Internet-connected Chinese folks all crowded over to Johnny to wait in line for up to a minute to see this wondrous site. However, since this one account was causing major problems for all the thousands of other accounts hosted on the server the tough decision was made to shut it down. Service has now returned to normal, and we can confirm with 100% certainty that no corporate or national security secrets were stolen from Johnny's hard drives. We keep all of that sort of stuff on Stevie which is conveniently blocked by China's own firewall.

Please join me in congratulating the newest member of the Heliohost support staff, Shinryuu. Not only has he recently received a free domain for helping out on the forums, but after some discussion with the existing moderators and administrators we took a vote and unanimously decided to offer him a promotion to moderator. Since this news post exists it goes without saying that he accepted the position. As Shinryuu has probably learned, volunteering your time at Heliohost has many benefits. Not only do you have the option to get paid for your posts by requesting a free domain paid for in full by Heliohost, but you also learn a lot in the process. Not to mention that intangible warm good feeling from helping people with their problems. 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. Congratulations Shinryuu, it's because of users like you that makes Heliohost great, and ensures that this free service will exist for many years to come.

Thank you to everyone who filed a report to Microsoft that their email addresses weren't accepting mail sent from accounts hosted on Heliohost servers. Thanks to your efforts Microsoft has unblocked our IP addresses, and email has been going to and from our servers normally for three days now. Not only that, but Microsoft has upgraded the status of all of our IP addresses from blocked or nearly blocked to normal all across the board. It just goes to show that if enough voices join together we can even get the attention of nearly unmovable behemoths like Microsoft. Congratulations on your amazing accomplishment!

Please type the IP address 65.19.143.2 into this link http://on-msn.com/dlwYQe For unknown reasons all Microsoft based email addresses (hotmail.com, live.com, live.ca, msn.com, etc) have begun blocking emails sent from accounts located on Heliohost. If everyone who uses Heliohost service could take five seconds to click the above link and type in the IP address 65.19.143.2 it would really help a lot. Feel free to post this to social media, or recruit all the visitors to your sites and everyone you know to do the same; it might get their attention to unblock us again.

Yesterday during a routine scan of Stevie's hard drive an error was detected on the partition primarily used for storage of system log files. Even though this is a non-critical data area and losing all of the log files wouldn't crash the server, Stevie was shutdown to fix the filesystem errors. The process was successful and fixing the problem only resulted in two hours of downtime. However, shortly after the server came back online it became obvious that there was also a problem with the filesystem that is used to store temporary files. At this point the decision was made to do a full system scan to make sure that there weren't any other problems that would show up down the line. Unfortunately full system scans take a very long time to complete, and that is the reason for the downtime overnight last night. We are happy to announce that the full system scan fixed the problems detected on the /tmp partition and the /var partition, and everything seems to be fully functional now. If you notice anything else unexpected happening please let us know. It should also be noted that this is very uncommon for Stevie to experience this kind of downtime. In fact, before the two reboots yesterday Stevie hadn't even been restarted in nearly 200 days. As is clearly indicated on our server monitors Stevie has had 99%+ uptime for the last six months, which is better than most paid hosting services.

After a couple days of inconsistent or non-existent service from ns2.heliohost.org everything is now back online and fully functional. During this time none of the Heliohost servers were actually offline, but since one of our two nameservers was malfunctioning roughly half of visitors to sites hosted on Stevie, Johnny, or even Cody could potentially see an error about the page not existing. DNS issues like this can be fairly random, intermittent, and simultaneously affecting one person while not affecting another so it can lead to a lot of confusion among site owners. All issues over the last few days that appeared to be related to this DNS malfunction have been consolidated into one customer service thread located here. However, if you're still having issues with your specific site please let us know by starting a new topic, and the Heliohost staff will be happy to help you.