HelioHost

Tomorrow, 2020-09-06 around 20:00 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 three shared free hosting servers, Tommy, Ricky, and Johnny will be offline for a little while. Some of the VPS will need to be rebooted as well. Your VPS 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.

This morning the data center where we house our servers experienced a power outage resulting in all of HelioHost services going offline. The whole building switched over to generator power, and with the help of our onsite technicians we were able to get everything back online. If you're a VPS owner you might want to check to make sure everything booted up properly for you on your server. If you notice anything not working, or behaving strangely please let us know. Thanks.

We're happy to announce that we've made some changes to the way Java access is installed on the Johnny server, and it seems to be having a very positive effect on the wait times. Java is one of our most popular services that we offer, but it uses a lot of memory, and the more people who have access to it the higher the memory usage becomes. We obviously have a finite amount of memory available on each server so we have to restrict who has access. To request access you just create an account on Johnny or Tommy and click the Java button in cpanel. Tommy accounts usually receive access within 24 hours, but the wait on Johnny is considerably longer. Prior to the changes on May 24th the wait time estimate for a Johnny account to receive Java access was a ridiculous 6 months! Since the changes that wait time has dropped drastically and now is sitting at about 45 days. Still a long wait, but much better than 6 months. If you need Java access as soon as possible it's still a good idea to create an account on Tommy, but the wait time is looking a lot better on Johnny too.

Over the next few days expect some downtime on our nameserver ns1.heliohost.org. We are going to be moving ns1 off Tommy and onto a new server named Brody. Our other nameserver, ns2, which is located on Cody will be unaffected by this downtime. Websites can function just fine with only one nameserver, but registering new domains may be affected if the registrar requires two functional nameservers. If you do have an issue adding a new domain, check out the server monitor http://heliohost.grd.net.pl/monitor/ on the bottom two lines. Wait until the second to the bottom line to be green, and try again. The reason we're going to be moving ns1 to a new server is because Tommy has gotten a little overcrowded lately, and performance isn't as good as we'd like. Moving the nameserver will reduce the memory usage on Tommy drastically which will allow for better performance, and more user accounts. Let us know if you have any questions.

15 years ago on March 2nd 2005 HelioHost was born. The last 15 years have had their ups and downs, but we managed to weather everything that was thrown our way and even thrive. We adamantly stuck to our ideals to continue providing free web hosting to thousands of users worldwide, and have grown considerably along the way. We started as a simple forum and cPanel reseller plan, then we moved to a VPS, followed by renting a dedicated server. After that in 2008 we bought our first server, Stevie, and two years later in 2010 we bought our second server, Charlie. Then in 2016 we bought our third server, Eddie. In 2018 we ran dangerously low on storage space so we reached out to the community by starting a fundraiser to buy more hard drive space. The fundraiser was a success and we used the extra space to create a Windows server named Lily. The extra storage space that the community funded has also allowed us to start offering affordable VPS subscriptions in addition to our free shared hosting plans. Finally, in 2019 we ran another successful fundraiser to buy our fourth server, Sparkie. We're not done either. We will continue to do what we're doing for as long as there is a need for free hosting. Who knows what the future will bring?

The work we were doing on the HelioHost hardware is now done. It took longer than we anticipated so we had to go back the next day to finish. Everything should be online now, and the short downtime is over. Let us know if you notice anything behaving oddly. We should see considerable speed increases for network traffic, and more speed overall; especially on the VPS.

HelioHost will be upgrading our network hardware in a few hours. This will result in a short downtime for all HelioHost services including the main website, the forums, the wiki, all accounts on Johnny, Ricky, and Tommy, and all VPS. We don't expect the downtime to be very long, and no reboots should be necessary.

Username: N/A, Server: N/A, Main Domain: N/A Good morning, Can you please reactivate my Tommy account? Login: akcoop Please let me know if any additional info is needed. Thanks, Amanda

Anna Foster over at Top10-Websitehosting.co.uk has written an article about HelioHost. You can check it out at https://www.top10-websitehosting.co.uk/heliohost-review

The Johnny accounts are now done being transferred over to Sparkie. There were a few accounts that couldn't be moved automatically for one reason or another, so if your account is still offline let us know by creating a new topic in the customer service forum and we'll get you taken care of. Johnny is now a clean slate so if you need php extensions or python modules installed for your site to work let us know. We'll be happy to install them for you, but we're not going to just blindly install everything that was on the old Johnny because we want to keep this server as fast as we can, and installing everything available will make him slow and bloated. We'll be opening limited free Johnny signups tonight at midnight UTC. Over the next few weeks we'll try to find a nice balance between having as many signups open as possible, and keeping the load reasonable. Thanks for your patience and understanding during this much needed server upgrade. Also a huge thanks goes out to all of our donors who funded the purchase of this new server. You all are awesome!

Johnny has been rebuilt on Sparkie, and as I type the first accounts are being transferred over to the new server. We have done considerable upgrades to the new version of Johnny, and we're excited to see what he can do. We increased the memory by 108%, and increased the CPU speed by 45%. Johnny also has all the latest software versions just like his big brother Tommy. We're hoping to be able to increase the time each day that we can offer free signups. The goal is to offer unlimited signups each day on Johnny, and continue to have limited signups on Ricky and Tommy to keep them stable. We have to turn away literally hundreds of potential users eager to try out our free hosting every day simply because our servers don't have enough capacity to support everyone that wants quality free hosting. This new Johnny server should go a long ways towards fixing that issue. Free signups on Johnny are still closed while we continue to restore all of the existing Johnny accounts. Accounts that had java enabled already will not have to wait in line for java again, and those who were in line to receive java will still be in the same position in line. We'll make another news post once all the accounts are restored.

Just as a reminder, the Johnny upgrade starts tomorrow. This means that we will be taking offline all of the accounts that are currently on the Johnny server unless you move to Ricky or Tommy. A couple hours ago was the last chance to create a free account on Ricky or Tommy before the upgrade, but it's not too late to donate to be moved. If you don't want to switch servers your account will automatically be moved to the new upgraded Johnny, but it may be a week or more before we're done with the upgrade during which time your account will be offline. We're really excited to move Johnny to Sparkie and see what our new server is capable of.

HelioHost is happy to announce that we're going to be upgrading the Johnny server soon. You may have seen the fundraiser that we've had going to purchase a new server named Sparkie. We're not 100% to the goal yet, but we were so excited to buy a new server that we went ahead and bought it early. Hopefully we can get it fully funded soon. Since we already have the new hardware we decided this would be a great time to upgrade Johnny. He has been our slowest and worst uptime server since he was created in 2011. Just like we upgraded Tommy recently, it's time for Johnny to be upgraded. As part of the upgrade process we need to temporarily move all the accounts off Johnny though. As a Johnny user you have a few options: Do nothing. If you don't do anything your account will automatically get moved to the new Johnny located on Sparkie. 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 Johnny, and until the upgrade is done your account will be offline. Move to Ricky or Tommy for free. If you backup your Johnny account, and delete it you can resignup on Ricky 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 Ricky will surely fill fast too since so many people will be moving off Johnny. 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 Johnny 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 Johnny 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. Let us know if you have any questions. We plan on beginning the upgrade process in one week on November 14th. Donate to Move

HelioHost now has it's own subreddit! We need all of you to go create some content though, because it's awfully empty over there. Reddit frequently finds itself near the top of search results so it might be helpful if everyone came up with one question that they had when they created their first account and asked it on our subreddit. That way people who are just discovering HelioHost who might have that same question will have their answer without doing too much searching. Also if you want to leave a quick review of our services that would be great too. Thanks everyone! https://www.reddit.com/r/HelioHost/

Are you on Ricky or Johnny and want to move to Tommy? Jenova wants to donate for you to move your account. HelioHost's most generous donor has decided to donate on the behalf of one Johnny or Ricky user each month to have them moved to Tommy, storage space doubled to 2000 MB, and granted one month of inactivity immunity. All you have to do is go to his forum and fill out an application and he will choose one lucky winner at the end of each month. This is a great opportunity for users who can't donate on their own. More details can be found at https://www.helionet.org/index/topic/37319-jenovas-free-tommy-move-event/ Good luck!

Check out our guide to getting started with RoR on HelioHost https://wiki.helionet.org/Ruby_on_Rails

Tommy will once again be available for free signups starting in 90 minutes at midnight UTC 2019-10-11.

All of the accounts that were on Tommy when he crashed have now been transferred back, or invited to create a new account. If you haven't received your invite, or if your account wasn't automatically transferred please let us know now by creating a new topic in the customer support forum.

Our flagship server has received some considerable upgrades over the last month that we wanted to let you all know about. Tommy was already our best server, but since the opportunity arose we went ahead and made him even better. Obviously we had to replace the hard drive, but we didn't cheap out. We purchased a brand new high performance drive that in benchmark testing is resulting in up to 840% faster reads and writes than Tommy's old set up. We've doubled the number of CPU cores from 4 up to 8 which should allow even faster processing power and improved multitasking. We've also increased the memory by a whopping 160%, and increased the available swap space by another 160%. Tommy also sports all the cutting edge software, such as the latest versions of cpanel 82, django 2.2.5, flask 1.1.1, python 3.7, node 10.16.3, and a lot more. We're still in the process of moving people back onto Tommy, but we've already had some really positive feedback. One user that has been moved back to Tommy already simply said, "Wow! Tommy speed :)". We think that sums things up nicely. Let us know if you have any questions.

Tommy has been rebuilt and we are already in the process of transferring the first accounts to him. We will be going down the list of all of the accounts that were on Tommy when he crashed, and either sending an invite to the email address, or if the email address is already in use on Johnny or Ricky that account will be moved to Tommy. Obviously we can't move thousands of accounts in a single day so we will be working our way down a list that is more or less sorted by donation amount. This means that if you donated a relatively large amount you will be among the first to get back on Tommy. The list has been randomized somewhat though to be as fair as possible. It will likely take a few weeks to get everyone moved or invited back onto Tommy though so please continue to be patient. If your email address is on our list and you created a new account on Ricky or Johnny, but you don't want for whatever reason to be moved back to Tommy just let us know and we'll remove you from the list. Once all of the donors and previous Tommy account owners have been transferred or created their new Tommy accounts we will open Tommy for free daily signups again, but it will be a while before that happens. If you're not on the list, and don't want to wait for free signups feel free to make a donation at https://www.heliohost.org/donate/ and let us know the transaction ID. The email address that you donate from will be added to the list, and you will receive your invite when your turn comes. If you have any questions please let us know.

HelioHost is proud to announce that when the Tommy server comes back online we will be offering experimental node.js support. We will be posting a wiki article explaining how to get started with node.js soon. If you're not familiar with what this is check out https://nodejs.org/ We will be running node version 10.16.3 to begin with so make sure your applications are compatible. This is a feature that we've been asked about many times, and we're excited to offer it. Depending on the memory usage and load it puts on the server we may need to restrict the number of accounts that have access to it similar to how we have Tomcat access set up. Since node is really memory hungry we may need to enact memory limitations on each individual node instance as well. Let us know if you have any questions or comments.

We're pleased to announce that we will be supporting PHP 7.3 when the Tommy server comes back online. This is in addition to PHP 5.4, 5.5, 5.6, 7.0, 7.1, and 7.2 that we already offer. Ricky and Johnny will eventually have PHP 7.3 as well when they are upgraded. Keep in mind that the Tommy server isn't currently available for signups, and we will make a news post announcing when user accounts can be created again.

Our account creation process has been improved. When you create an account we actually create two accounts for you. One account is the hosting account itself, and the other is a forum account to make getting support easier. The way it worked before was if you deleted your hosting account you wouldn't be able to recreate that same username because your forum account still existed and would block anyone from choosing that username. This meant that you would need to get an admin to change your forum username temporarily before you would be able to recreate your hosting username. This was confusing for users because they would obviously think that since they can't reuse the username it must mean their old account wasn't deleted yet. It also made a lot more work for the admins because we would have to explain all of the above, then rename their forum account, and then rename it back once the new hosting account was created. Now the account creation process not only allows you to use the same username as a forum account, but actually suggests it if it finds an already existing forum account that matches your email address. This also means that no one else can steal your username while you're in the middle of moving between two servers, because the only way you can have a username that already exists on the forums is if you have access to that email address. The reason we implemented these changes now is because the Tommy server will be coming back online soon, and we want to make it as easy as possible for people to recreate their accounts. Let us know if you find any bugs or if things aren't behaving the way you would expect.

The scheduled maintenance on Eddie is now complete and everything should be coming back online.

We will be performing scheduled maintenance on Eddie tomorrow. This will result in downtime on our main website, heliohost.org, our forums, helionet.org, and our wiki, wiki.helionet.org. This will also result in downtime on any VPS that are located on Eddie. When the maintenance begins we will cleanly shutdown all online VPS using the vmware-tools that all HelioVPS start out with. We will be removing the dead hard drive, and replacing it with a brand new drive which will allow us to rebuild the Tommy server to be faster and even better uptime than before. After the maintenance is complete we will boot up all of the active VPS, but we recommend taking a look at your server to make sure everything booted up properly.