HelioHost

Tommy backups are now available via https://www.heliohost.org/backup/ We backed up the home directories and mysql databases so far. We're still working on postgresql databases, but very few people use it so the backups are ready for the majority of people. If the backup system doesn't work for you post in customer service, and an admin can help you. If anything is missing from your backup please let us know as soon as possible. We plan on wiping Tommy and installing the new hard drive on August 20th, so you only have four days to figure out if anything is missing. If you let us know that something is missing before we wipe Tommy there is a chance we can find it and back it up for you, but after August 20th it will be gone forever.

What are we doing? We're still working on creating backups. It's taking longer than we expected. What did we lose? As far as we can tell at this point no data will be lost. Right now we're backing up the home directories, and archived accounts. As is the case in most crashes, the mysql innodb databases have a very poor chance of being recovered, but we're going to do our best to try to back them up as well. We always recommend people use myisam, and we have it set as default, for this very reason. Innodb data pretty much always gets lost during a crash. The mysql myisam databases are for sure intact. Postgresql databases have been backed up, but it's too early to tell if anything was lost. We'll make a news post when the backups are available for download. What should you do? It's going to be a while before we can get Tommy back online, and when we do it's going to be a fresh server with no accounts on it. This means you should probably create a temporary account on Johnny or Ricky in the meantime, and once Tommy is rebuilt you can have your account moved back onto Tommy. As far as your domains go it's probably safest to just make sure your account is created, and then we can straighten out the domains later. If you need a domain freed up that was hosted on Tommy just make a post on the forums requesting it. Once the backups are available we'll let you know via a news post and you can download them and restore them on to your temporary account. What happens next? We have ordered a new hard drive for Tommy, and Ashoat (the founder of HelioHost) is going to be at our datacenter in silicon valley next Tuesday the 20th. While he's there he's going to install Sparkie in our cabinet, and replace the dead hard drive from Eddie, which will allow us to rebuild Tommy. How long until Tommy is back? We don't have a set date, but getting Tommy back online is our top priority. As long as everything goes as planned, the new hard drive will be installed on August 20th, and it will take a few days after that to set everything up and test the new server. Tommy should be back, with better uptime, even faster, and better than ever before by September 1st. Maybe sooner. What happened? One of Eddie's hard drives that held critical system files for Tommy died, but luckily it wasn't the hard drives that held the home directories or databases. Since it was operating system files that were lost it means that Tommy won't boot or connect to the internet or run any programs or do much of anything right now, but we are trying to back everything up. Why did this happen? It's no secret that we're very short on cash. This is why we have a fundraiser going. We push everything as far as it's possible to go. That means pushing old hardware as long as it can go, pushing cpanel to handle more accounts than even the creators of cpanel ever expected, and unfortunately pushing old hard drives much longer than is reasonable. Will this happen to Tommy again? Probably not. The hard drive that failed is about 10 years old, and has been running constantly since we bought the server. We're replacing it with a brand-new, fresh-from-the-factory, never-been-used hard drive. We understand that this is a very confusing time, and you all have a lot of questions. Hopefully this answered some of the common ones, but if you have other questions please ask away. Thanks for your patience.

Between the money we've raised on the gofundme page https://www.gofundme.com/sparkie-server and the money that has been donated to us directly through paypal since our fundraiser started in April we've now raised roughly 85% of the money we were asking for. Since we're so close, and since Tommy crashed we figured it's time to buy a new server even though we didn't quite make it to the full goal. You all did an amazing job of donating and we think you deserve a new server as a thank you for your efforts. Sparkie has been purchased and will be shipped to our datacenter next week.

The good news is Tommy's data is intact. We are currently backing up home directories, mysql, and postgresql databases before we try any further attempts to boot him up. We'll let you know when we have more information.

Eddie has been rebooted and everything other than Tommy should be coming back online now. If you're a VPS owner your server has been started, but you might want to make sure that all of your services on your VPS have started automatically. Tommy is going to take some additional work. We'll let you know once we have more info.

We're having some issues with Eddie. This affects Cody which hosts our main website, and the forums, the Tommy server, and some of our VPS. We're going to reboot Eddie immediately which will result in some downtime for those listed.

You can now earn immunity to your account going inactive by donating to Sparkie! https://www.gofundme.com/sparkie-server So now if you donate $5 you get double storage space. If you donate $10 you get double storage AND two months before you need to login again to keep your account active. If you donate $15 you get double storage and three months, and so on. If you already donated and received your double storage space we will be going through and handing out inactivity immunity as well soon, but if you'd like to make another donation to get even more inactivity immunity feel free. Also keep in mind that whoever donates the largest amount will earn themselves a monstrous VPS for six months with 16 GB memory, 8 cpus, 300 GB hard drive space, unlimited bandwidth, a dedicated IPv4 address, and your choice of operating system. That's a $318 value! The current highest donation is $100 so if you donate $101 you could beat him and still save $217 over the price that the VPS would normally cost. Of course, if someone beats you, you're welcome to make another donation to take the lead again. The total of each person's donations will be used to determine whoever donated the most. Over the last month we've raised $894 towards Sparkie, and another $370 directly through paypal. That brings our total to $1264 which is about 46% of the way to the goal of buying a new server. We're doing great everyone, and we hope to have the new server soon. Thanks!

HelioHost is going to buy a new server named Sparkie! https://www.gofundme.com/sparkie-server - Anyone who donates $5 or more will have their shared hosting account storage doubled to 2000 MB. - If you donated during our last fundraiser and already have 2000 MB, another $5 or more donation will increase your storage to 3000 MB. - Whoever donates the largest amount will win a beast of a VPS for six months with 16 GB memory, 8 cpus, 300 GB hard drive space, unlimited bandwidth, a dedicated IPv4 address, and your choice of operating system. That's a $318 value! Our servers are getting pretty old and slow so it's time to buy something newer and faster. The server we will be buying has 128 GB memory, and dual xeon processors with a total of 16 cpu cores. This will give us plenty of speed and room to expand our services in the future. We will install our new server, that we're going to name Sparkie, in our cabinet within a professional data center located in the heart of Silicon Valley. Unfortunately, HelioHost has been losing money for the last few years. We still have enough money in our accounts to last for several more years so you don't need to worry about us shutting down tomorrow, but losing money every year like this isn't sustainable. We've made huge strides over the last few months to reduce our bills. Our projected yearly operating cost is down a whopping 18.87% over last year. We are also now earning 7.57% of our operating costs in the form of VPS sales, and we hope to be able to increase that further as we sell even more VPSes. The rest of our funding comes from ad revenue and donations. Here's what our finances look like for 2018: As you can see we lost $1839 in 2018. If we fully finance this fundraiser, not only will be be able to buy our new server, but we'll break even for 2018. Our goal of $2750 includes our 2018 deficit, the cost of the server, the rails, cables, and expected GoFundMe fees. With the addition of Sparkie to our server lineup we will be able to provide free hosting to even more users, and be able to sell even more VPSes. We believe this will allow us to stay afloat for many years to come. Thanks!

Some changes have been made to all of the servers to fix the bug that results in all new files being uploaded with 664, and all new directories having 775 permissions. This is an annoyance for users because php especially doesn't like it when files aren't 644. The result of 664 php scripts is a 500 error which can be difficult for inexperienced users to diagnose. The last time we tried to fix this bug it resulted in a lot of other unexpected side effects which were worse than the original issue so since then we've just dealt with it hoping cpanel would eventually fix the issue, but unfortunately the bug still exists even on the latest version. Let us know if you notice anything like SFTP, FTP, file manager, etc. behaving oddly. Hopefully this is the end of the permissions annoyance for good.

HelioHost users on Tommy can now track the resource usage of their account with a graph in cpanel. Load and memory usage has always been a rather confusing aspect of our servers. Sometimes websites that were born on our servers get too popular for us to support them on our free shared hosting plans, and unfortunately they have to migrate to a VPS or find a way to reduce their load. Other times users may be running a poorly written site such as Wordpress and even though they aren't getting hardly any traffic their site begins to slow down our servers or cause downtime. Rather than causing the thousands of other sites on that server to have poor performance we are forced to suspend the high load account. If your account is on Tommy you can now keep an eye on your own load so hopefully it won't come as quite as much of a surprise when we have to suspend your account. This will also allow you to notice the high load prior to the point where it will result in your account being suspended and correct the issues to reduce load. The graph represents a comparison between your account and the rest of the accounts on your server. If your cpu or memory usage is listed at 100 that means your account is using more of that server resource than all of the other thousands of accounts on the same server as you, and you have a high chance of being suspended. You can find the new cpanel buttons listed under the metrics header, or by searching for "load" in cpanel. After the new plugin is beta tested on Tommy we plan on implementing it on our other servers as well eventually. Let us know if you have any questions or if you notice anything odd about the new plugin.

Nobody likes being told no, but unfortunately our service has limitations and sometimes it just isn't possible to do what people want to do. Whenever someone encountered one of those limitations, it pained us to do so, but we had to send them elsewhere. Well, we got tired of saying no, and we have a better solution now rather than sending you off to use someone else's hosting service. HelioHost now offers VPS (virtual private servers). With a VPS you can be the root administrator of your own private server, and you can do pretty much anything you want with it. If you're not satisfied with the speed of our shared hosting? A VPS is going to be as fast as it gets. Do you need up to 300 GB of hard drive space? We can do that. If you want SSH access? You've got it. Do you need to run some high load script that would get you suspended on our shared hosting account? Let's do it. If you want to install a language that a free HelioHost account doesn't support? Go right ahead. Perhaps you want to use a NoSQL database like MongoDB? It can be done. The HelioHost admins will even help you transfer your existing website over to the VPS for you if you need. You may not know how to run a server, but we do and we can help anyone get started. You might want to act quickly though because there are a limited number of VPS available, and when we run out we'll need to purchase more servers and that could take a while. To get started, and to see what we have available just go to https://www.heliohost.org/vps/

If you need to buy something on Amazon you can now help support HelioHost at no additional cost to you. To get started go to https://smile.amazon.com/ch/27-2285629 to set your charity to Helio Networks, and then continue shopping as normal. As long as your url starts with smile.amazon.com part of your purchases will be donated by Amazon to HelioHost. This doesn't cost you anything extra! Amazon is the one that donates when you shop, but you pay the same price for the same products as if you were shopping at www.amazon.com. If you need to buy something on Amazon anyways you may as well use our link to do so.

The Tommy server has been updated to Django 2.1.4 on Python 3.6. The upgrade went smoothly, and everything seems to be working. You can check the current versions of all the Python modules on Tommy's Python 3.6 at https://krydos.heliohost.org/cgi-bin/modules36.py If you want to use Python 2.7 with Django you'll need to be on the Ricky server. Tommy and Johnny run Django on Python 3.6. The Django versions on Johnny and Ricky will be upgraded as well eventually. The Django guide on our wiki https://wiki.helionet.org/Django has been tested and works with the new version. Let us know if you notice anything behaving oddly.

Our free hosting is simply too popular. We can't handle the number of people who come to us looking for a place to host their website for free. We understand how frustrating it is to try to create an account only to be told that all the servers are full for the day. All of the HelioHost admins were once regular users just like you all, and we had to deal with limited signups to create our accounts as well. Most of us had to stay up until 2am or 3am multiple nights in a row to get an account and we know that's pretty frustrating. Our hope with the Johnny server was to be able to provide unlimited signups so people who don't want to wait for a free signup on one of our production servers could create an account immediately and get started on their website. Then once they were done testing and experimenting they could move to Tommy or Ricky. Unfortunately unlimited signups aren't working. Johnny's uptime has dropped to a dismal 63%, and the load is through the roof 24 hours a day. We've done everything we can to reduce load by disabling most of the features that users on Tommy and Ricky enjoy, but still there are simply too many accounts being created on Johnny. We don't think it's fair for someone to create an account on Johnny only to realize too late that their website is pretty much never going to be online. The only thing left that we can do is limit the number of new signups each day until we can get the uptime back to a reasonable level. Once the uptime and load get balanced out we'll open signups a little more, but try not to let this poor, overworked server get so overloaded again.

We're planning on making a major upgrade to Django on the Tommy server. We are currently running Django v1.11.6 which was released over a year ago on October 5th. We plan on upgrading to Django v2.1.4, and if you are using Django on Tommy we recommend using your home pc to test your site on the new version as soon as possible. As long everything goes as planned we expect the upgraded version of Django to be available in about a week. If you have any questions or comments about this major upgrade please let us know by replying to this news post.

The Tommy server has been updated to Tomcat version 9.0.12. This upgrade took a little longer than we expected because there is a bug in the latest version 9.0.13 https://www.mail-archive.com/dev@tomcat.apache.org/msg129523.html which would break our system. After we downgraded back to 9.0.12 it looks like everything is working now. Everyone who had java enabled was copied over to the new Tomcat, and all of the deployed .war servlets should be copied over as well. Let us know if you find anything behaving oddly. As long as everything looks good we will update Johnny's Tomcat 8.5 as well eventually, but for now if you want the latest and greatest version of Tomcat 9.0 you'll need to move your account to the Tommy server.

The HelioHost staff updated several mission critical operating system packages today which resulted in a few bugs for a couple hours. The main culprit was the openssl package which rendered our main website from being unable to communicate with the other servers. This means login attempts and password change requests at heliohost.org would always result in an error message. This should be fixed now. The other major issue we've noticed is that the system clock on one of our servers got way out of sync for a while. This resulted in some accounts being sent warning messages about not logging in to cpanel often enough. The clock has been synced back up, and all of the time based issues should now be resolved as well. Let us know if you notice anything else odd happening. This is why we only make major updates like this very rarely. Thank you for your patience during the buggy last couple of hours.

We're planning on making a major upgrade to Tomcat on the Tommy server. We are currently running Tomcat v8.5.24 which was released about a year ago on December 1st. We plan on upgrading to Tomcat v9.0, and if you're using java on Tommy we recommend using your home pc to test your site on the new version as soon as possible. As long everything goes as planned we expect the upgraded version of Tomcat to be available in about a week. If you have any questions or comments about this major upgrade please let us know by replying to this news post.

We're happy to announce that the extended maintenance on Johnny has been completed, and we're ready to start allowing users onto the server again. We're going to start with archived Johnny accounts first. If your account was on Johnny and has been archived let us know and we can restore your account for you. Tomorrow at midnight UTC we'll start allowing a few new account creations as well. Thank you for your patience during this long maintenance period.

Rowanna 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/

We recently started our fall fundraiser event by sending out an email to all of our users. On average it costs us $572.71 to do what we do each month. For the last couple years we've lost money. This isn't sustainable and we will eventually go out of business if it continues. This year isn't going very well so far. https://www.helionet.org/index/topic/33881-solved-what-do-heliohosts-month-to-month-finances-involve/?p=151920 As you can see we've lost over $1,800 so far this year. We need people like you to help us out. Every dollar helps, but if you donate $5 USD or more we can double the storage space available on your account as a thank you gift. We've noticed that some of the donations we've received so far don't match any accounts in our system. If your paypal email address differs from your hosting account email we won't be able to automatically match the donation to your account. If you want to receive your 2000 MB of storage space simply make a post in the customer service forum or email support@heliohost.org and let us know your paypal transaction id and your account username. If you believe in what we're doing and can make a tax-deductible contribution to keep us in the positive we would really appreciate it. Thanks for being a member of the community. You are what makes HelioHost great!

Christine Preusler over at HostingAdvice.com has written an article about HelioHost. You can check it out at https://www.hostingadvice.com/blog/heliohost-provides-free-hosting-to-a-tight-knit-community/

We’re going to take the servers offline in about an hour to do scheduled maintenance. This will affect all of our servers including our main website and forums.

All of the archived accounts on Johnny should now be available through our backup system at https://www.heliohost.org/backup/ If you want to move to Tommy or Ricky for free the first step is downloading your backup. Next, create your new account at https://www.heliohost.org/signup/ and then restore your backup. If you're a donor an admin can move your old Johnny account to Tommy for you. This allows you to skip the hassle of trying to be fast enough to get one of the limited number of accounts per day that are available, and all of your files and domains and settings will be set up for you on the new server. For more information on how to donate see https://www.heliohost.org/donate/ Let us know if you have any questions or need help with anything.

Tommy has been experiencing some downtime today due to DDoS attacks. We're moving everyone over to an ip address that isn't affected by the attack, but the old ip might stay cached in dns for a while. If you flush your os dns records it may speed up the process. If you're the one attacking us just let us know what you're issue is and we can solve it for you. Thanks for your patience during this unexpected downtime.