HelioHost

We have finally upgraded our forum! The software we were running for our support forum was written in 2013 so it was long overdue for an upgrade. You can still find the old forum located at https://classic.helionet.org/ if you need it. The new forum was upgraded from a backup made on June 13th so all new forum accounts and all new posts for the last two weeks only exist on the old forum not the new one. We will provide support on both forums for a while we get all the kinks worked out of the new system. Let us know if you notice anything acting strangely.

The power outage a few days ago corrupted the boot loader of our Ricky server which means that server won't boot up on its own anymore. With the help of the data center staff we managed to boot up the server on a boot usb drive in the hopes that we would be able to recover a backup of the hard drive. That backup process also failed. The bad news is it looks likely that the damage to the hard drive extends to more than just the boot loader. It's possible we've lost all the data on that version of Ricky. The good news is we have a full system backup of Ricky from less than a month ago that we have already booted up. Of course all the new accounts that were created within the last month don't exist on this Ricky backup, and any files and databases and everything have been reverted to a month ago as well. We're going down the list of Ricky accounts, and if they don't exist on this backup we're going to unarchive them or recreate them for you. For security we obviously don't keep plaintext passwords sitting around anywhere, so for a lot of accounts you'll have to reset your password to log in for the first time as your account will be created with a random temporary password. Just go to https://www.heliohost.org/reset/ or https://ricky.heliohost.org:2083/resetpass?start=1 to set your password. If you haven't backed up your Ricky account recently please let us know of any files or any databases that you would hope for us to be able to find for you. It's possible when we visit the data center in the next few months to install the hard drives that we'll be able to recover the missing files. If we have a list of files and databases to try to look for before we arrive at the data center it will make the process quicker. Thank you for your patience during this unfortunate situation.

HelioHost now has our own YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2LCwELO19fRueyk-EjycSg and our first video is a tutorial on how to set up a node.js website on Tommy. Please subscribe to the channel because if we can get to 100 subscribers we can use the channel name HelioHost instead of that obnoxious string of letters and numbers. The video was created by Unknown025, and he plans to create more videos for our channel. If you have any suggestions on what topics we should make videos for next we'd love to hear about it.

The power outage last night reset 1 of the 4 hard drives in our main vps raid array. No data was lost, but we re-added the drive to the array, and it is currently rebuilding. Since this raid array has most of the vps on it we're going to see slower than usual hard drive speeds on the vps until it finishes rebuilding. Once it finishes the speeds will go back to normal. In the meantime we've disabled new vps signups because the performance is too low to create any new vps. We'll let you know when we reopen vps signups.

Our data center had a power outage, and the backup generators failed. All of our servers went offline, but we're getting everything booted back up. Tommy and Johnny are fully online, but it's probably going to be a few days before we can get Ricky back online. Ricky's boot loader was corrupted in the power outage and won't boot. We're going to try booting him from a boot disk soon. It's too early to know if there is going to be any data loss on Ricky. We'll let you know when we have any updates on Ricky. If you're a vps owner you might want to login and check if everything booted up correctly for you. Let us know if you notice anything behaving oddly.

We are happy to announce that we've enabled autossl on the Johnny server. If you're on Ricky or Tommy you've already had autossl for years. On Johnny we had it disabled because it causes a lot of load, and people could install ssl certificates themselves manually if they wanted to. We've decided it is probably worth the extra load to provide ssl to people automatically though. Every website should have encryption. This likely means we won't be able to offer as many accounts as we used to on Johnny though, and the uptime on Johnny might not be as good because of the extra load. We'll try to keep things as balanced as we can. If things don't work out we may have to remove autossl again, but for now we're going to try it out. If you have a Johnny account you should see ssl get installed automatically over the next few days as the server works its way through the thousands of accounts. You can check the status or exclude domains from autossl through cpanel. If you have any questions or comments we'd love to hear from you. Thanks for being a HelioHost user.

Tommy's uptime has dipped below 99% and high load is causing too many errors for users on this server. That is unacceptable performance for our best server. Unfortunately this means we need to stop offering free signups for a while. Once Tommy's load has balanced out we will reopen free signups again. There is no set eta on when free signups will reopen. It may take a few weeks for the load to dissipate or it may be sooner. We'll let you know. In the meantime donors can still get a Tommy account. You can move an existing Johnny or Ricky account by making a donation of $1 USD or more, and then post your transaction id and username on the forums. If you don't already have an active account you can simply go to https://www.heliohost.org/tommy/ and donate $1 USD or more and a special Tommy invitation email will be sent to you, usually within seconds, which will allow you to create a Tommy account at any time of the day that is convenient to you. We hope to set up a new server that is even faster and better uptime than Tommy in the next few months. We don't have a set eta for the new server, but our hope is that it will take a lot of the load off Tommy which will allow us to provide great hosting performance both on Tommy as well as on the new server. So even if you don't move to the new server you should see increased speeds and reduced errors on Tommy once it is set up.

The nameserver upgrade isn’t going as smoothly as we had hoped. We’re having trouble getting the zones to sync to ns1. This means anyone who tries to visit your site has a roughly 50/50 chance of querying ns1 or ns2. If you’re unlucky you contact ns1 and are told that your website is offline. People who query ns2 see the website as online. We’re working to get it fixed as soon as possible.

We will be doing some nameserver maintenance over the next few hours. That means that ns1.heliohost.org and ns2.heliohost.org will be intermittently unavailable. This shouldn't have any effect on the uptime of your website though as long as one or the other is online.

HelioHost is proud to announce that our Tommy server now has PHP 7.4.19 and PHP 8.0.6 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. Ricky and Johnny only currently support up to 7.3 so if you need 7.4 or 8.0 you'll need to switch to Tommy for now. Ricky will be the next to receive 7.4 and 8.0, and Johnny will get them too eventually. 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://krydos.heliohost.org/74/phpinfo.php https://krydos.heliohost.org/80/phpinfo.php Thanks for being a HelioHost user! Enjoy your cutting edge php.

Ricky is now back online and everything seems to be functioning well. We'll be keeping a close eye on Ricky to make sure his performance remains acceptable.

We've discovered some issues with the recently rebuilt Ricky that we need to fix immediately. This will require some downtime starting in less than an hour. We'll get the work done as quickly as we can, but it might be a while before he is back online. We'll let you know with another news post when the maintenance is done. Thank for your patience while we make sure Ricky is as stable and fast as possible.

We have finally finished rebuilding Ricky and he will be available to create new accounts starting tonight at midnight UTC, which is a little over an hour from now. Since it took so much longer to complete this rebuild than we expected we're not going to automatically restore all of the active accounts from before the maintenance started because it's likely most of those people have switched servers or given up entirely at this point. If you had an active Ricky account when he was shutdown please just make a post on the support forum requesting it to be unarchived and we will take care of them one at a time. There was no data lost, and your account can be restored exactly how it was prior to the maintenance. As a reminder, Ricky is a clean slate which means only a few basic php extensions are currently installed, and only a few python modules are available as well. If you need something added just let us know and we will install things as needed. Also if you had remote postgresql access prior to the rebuild you'll need to request it again. Ricky has the cutting edge python 3.9.5 that was released less than 2 weeks ago, and all the latest versions possible of everything. As before Ricky doesn't support java, asp.net, node.js, etc. If you have questions about what is available just ask. Once again we must apologize for how much longer it took to complete this rebuild than we expected. We're happy though because Ricky is performing perfectly so far, and is much faster than he was on the older hardware. Thanks for your patience during this extended maintenance.

We recently hit the goal for our latest fundraiser! This means HelioHost is going to be getting a pretty good upgrade soon. Johnny will be faster as we will be separating the VPS and Johnny from the hard drive that they are on currently and moving them both to their own new, much faster hard drives. The VPS will be faster because they won't have Johnny hogging all the hard drive speed and slowing everything down. We already upgraded our network which helps during ddos attacks and makes everything faster. We are also in the process of moving Ricky to a newer faster server. The next step is to use the fundraiser money to buy the new hard drives, and then Ashoat, the founder of HelioHost, will install the new hardware in our datacenter. Thank you so much to everyone who donated. It is because of you that HelioHost will continue to survive and improve.

Starting tomorrow, 2021-04-02, Tommy will once again be accepting free signups beginning at midnight UTC. Tommy's stability has returned, and the uptime is good enough to start allowing free accounts again. We're also making progress with Ricky, even though we've had to start over entirely multiple times, and hope to have him re-opened soon as well.

First of all we need to apologize for how long the Ricky rebuild is taking. Literally everything that could go wrong has. We're still working on it and hope to get the Ricky rebuild done soon. Because Ricky has been down for so long everyone is jumping ship and moving to Tommy, but that has overloaded Tommy. Tommy's uptime is now below 99% which is completely unacceptable. As of today we are suspending all free signups on Tommy until further notice to help stabilize what is supposed to be our best server. If you'd like to donate to get a Tommy account you still can, but we need to limit the number of new accounts to bring the load down. We have also been adjusting some variables on Tommy which should help with the uptime too. If you're already on Tommy please do everyone a favor though and try not to cause a lot of load for a while until we can get everything balanced out again. Thanks.

We've hit a cPanel bug while rebuilding Ricky that is a show stopper. We've contacted cPanel about how to fix it, and are waiting their response. It's going to be a while before Ricky is ready for accounts again though. It's not too late to move to Tommy with a donation, or create a new free account on Tommy or Johnny at midnight UTC. We're still trying to get Ricky rebuilt as quickly as possible, but it's going to take longer than we expected. We'll let you know as soon as Ricky is ready.

The system restart is now complete, and all the servers are booting back up. Let us know if anything is not working properly. Thanks for your patience during this scheduled maintenance.

Tomorrow, 2021-02-11 around 04:00 UTC, we will be rebooting some of the HelioHost servers as part of a routine scheduled maintenance. The main websites, heliohost.org, helionet.org, and all the shared free hosting servers, both Tommy and Johnny will be offline for a little while. Some of the VPS will need to be rebooted as well. If your VPS needs to be rebooted it will be powered off cleanly via the installed vmware tools package, and then powered on again once the reboot has completed. Be sure to check to make sure everything has booted up properly afterwards. Another news post will be made once the maintenance is complete. Let us know if you have any questions. Thank you for your patience during this scheduled downtime.

HelioHost is happy to announce that we're going to be upgrading the Ricky server soon. You may have noticed that Ricky has crashed a few times over the last couple weeks. This is because he is long overdue for an upgrade. Occasionally we have to rebuild all of our servers to keep them in an acceptable operating state. We were originally planning on upgrading Ricky in spring 2020, but our plans were delayed because of the pandemic since it wasn't safe to travel in the US. We have finally gotten the hardware set up in our datacenter the way it needs to be so that we can upgrade Ricky now. As part of the upgrade process we need to temporarily move all the accounts off Ricky though. Then we will move Ricky from Stevie to the faster Charlie server. As a Ricky user you have a few options: Do nothing. If you don't do anything your account will automatically get moved to the new Ricky located on Charlie. It's free, it's easy, and we'll take care of everything for you. The downside is your website will be offline for at least a couple days, if not a week or more. We're unsure how long it will take to upgrade Ricky, and until the upgrade is done your account will be offline. The last time we did a rebuild like this on Johnny it took 8 days, but Ricky could be longer or shorter depending on if we run into any problems. Move to Johnny or Tommy for free. If you backup your Ricky account, and delete it you can resignup on Johnny or Tommy for free at midnight UTC. Keep in mind that signups are limited per day, and they will fill quickly. Tommy usually fills within a few seconds, and Johnny will surely fill faster than usual too since so many people will be moving off Ricky. We will increase the number of available free signups as much as we can, but there simply isn't room on our other servers to move all of the Ricky accounts over even temporarily. Donate to be moved to Tommy. This is the best option if you want to minimize the downtime on your site. All you have to do is donate as little as $1 USD and a HelioHost admin will move your account to Tommy for you. You don't have to delete your account or signup again or anything. Just make the donation, post your transaction ID and username, and we'll take care of all the rest. Tommy is our flagship server, and as such has the best uptime, and fastest speed of all of our servers. Even after we upgrade Ricky we expect Tommy to be better so this is a great opportunity to move if you're interested. If you want to donate $5 or more we'll even throw in double storage space as well during the move. Let us know if you have any questions. We plan on beginning the upgrade process in one week on February 6th. Donate to Move

Marko Velimirović over at websiteplanet.com conducted an an interview with HelioHost's CEO, Ben Frede, and published an article about us. You can check it out at https://www.websiteplanet.com/blog/interview-Ben-Frede/

We have purchased a new domain, heliohost.us, that users can create free subdomains on. None of the subdomains are currently in use so if there has been a subdomain on heliohost.org that have always wished was yours now is a great opportunity to snag the heliohost.us version. All new accounts created on HelioHost from today onwards will be required to be on the new heliohost.us domain, and any domain name changes will be unable to use the heliohost.org subdomain anymore. If you have a heliohost.org subdomain that you like you will be allowed to keep it if you want to. If you need help changing your main domain just let us know and we'll be happy to help.

HelioHost has big plans to upgrade our servers this year! Check out what we're planning and see how you can help at 2020 Server Improvements

We've just discovered that some of our VPS may be affected by a memory leak. Ubuntu 20 for sure has this issue, and other OS choices may as well. Here are some of the symptoms you can check to see if this issue is affecting your VPS: /var/log/journal/ is huge: root@krydos5:/var/log/journal# du -sh /var/log/journal 2.5G /var/log/journal The journald process is using tons of memory. This command shows you the percent of memory that journald is using. In this example journald is using 23.6% of the total system memory: root@krydos5:/var/log/journal# ps -o %mem,command ax|grep -v grep|grep journald 23.6 /lib/systemd/systemd-journald The journal log is full of lines about sda every few seconds: root@krydos5:/home/krydos# journalctl -xe Sep 27 15:42:24 krydos5.heliohost.org multipathd[685]: sda: add missing path Sep 27 15:42:24 krydos5.heliohost.org multipathd[685]: sda: failed to get udev uid: Invalid argument Sep 27 15:42:24 krydos5.heliohost.org multipathd[685]: sda: failed to get sysfs uid: Invalid argument Sep 27 15:42:24 krydos5.heliohost.org multipathd[685]: sda: failed to get sgio uid: No such file or directory The /dev/disk/by-id/ directory doesn't have any lines beginning with scsi* root@krydos5:/home/krydos# ls -la /dev/disk/by-id/ total 0 drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 60 Sep 14 03:53 . drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 140 Sep 14 03:53 .. lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Sep 14 03:53 ata-VMware_Virtual_SATA_CDRW_Drive_00000000000000000001 -> ../../sr0 If your VPS is showing these signs that means you are affected by this memory leak. The temporary solution is to restart journald to recover the memory and delete old logs to recover the disk space. The better and permanent solution is we can shutdown your VPS, edit the hardware configuration, and boot your VPS back up for you. It will result in less than 10 minutes of downtime. The reason this memory leak is happening is because we've been using the default ESXI configuration to create new VPS, but apparently that configuration doesn't provide the scsi uuid to the OS. The os tries to check the uuid every few seconds, and fills the logs quickly. All future VPS we sell shouldn't have this issue anymore now that we know about it and can configure the hardware to show the scsi uuid to the OS.

The system restart is now complete, and all the servers are booting back up. Let us know if anything is not working properly. Thanks for your patience during this scheduled maintenance.