HelioHost

Since Johnny's uptime has been so poor lately we decided this would be a good time to do some extended maintenance to fix some memory leaks. We are archiving all of the accounts on Johnny to make it easier for users to move to Ricky or Tommy. If you're a donor an admin can move your account for you, or you'll be able to download your archive from our backup system shortly if you want to move your account yourself.

If your account is located on the new and improved Johnny you will now get an inactivity warning email a few days in advance of your site being taken offline just like users on Ricky and Tommy have enjoyed for a while now.

In about an hour we're going to open a limited number of free signups for the new Johnny server. This server is vastly upgraded over the last iteration in every way. Over the next few weeks is an especially good time to create your Johnny account if you want to use Java as the wait time for Tomcat access will start out at several hours on Johnny and will likely skyrocket to several months eventually. We're going to start out with a small number of signups each day and as the system gets fully tested by the first users we'll open it up over the next few weeks with the goal of having 24 hour availability of free signups per day as before. Creating those ridiculous numbers of accounts each day will inevitably result in instability as the server fills up, but we'll do our best to keep the uptime as high as possible. If you want a stable production grade server we still recommend Tommy or Ricky as both of those servers will continue to have limited numbers of new accounts per day. If you have any questions let us know.

If you donated to our GoFundMe campaign you should now have double the storage space up from 1000 MB to 2000 MB. There were a few donations that couldn't be associated with any accounts though. If you made your donation from a different email address than your HelioHost contact address we were unable to double your storage. If you donated and your storage space hasn't been doubled please let us know so we can correct the issue. Our apologies for taking so long to get this done, but all of the recent issues with Johnny delayed it by quite a bit. Once again a big thanks goes out to all of our donors who made our hard drive space increase possible.

Please go to https://www.heliohost.org/backup/ to download your Johnny backup. It took us a few days to accomplish this monumental task, but we have managed to back up the data from over 12,000 accounts. It is all now available for download, and at this time we have no reason to believe that any data has been lost in the crash. Let us know if you need any help creating your new Ricky or Tommy account and restoring your backup.

We have been able to backup all of the user data on Johnny, and we will be providing links to download your data in the next couple days. We recommend creating a Ricky or Tommy account in the meantime, and then once your backup is available you can restore it onto your new account. Let us know if there's any way we can help you with this process.

After extensive testing it looks like Johnny has suffered one too many crashes and it scrambled his filesystem completely. The hard drive itself appears to be perfectly intact. It's just the operating system that is corrupt. This means that it is highly likely he will crash again after a random amount of time. We have brought Johnny online so people can try to quickly take a backup of their site. If Johnny continues crashing we will be forced to take the next step in the repair process which will undoubtedly result in data loss from the hard drive. That is why we're going to encourage people to take backups quickly.

Johnny continues to crash, and we're investigating the cause. As a reminder to everyone, if your account is located on Johnny you won't be able to log in to your account while the server is down. It will just always say invalid login. You also won't be able to change your password as long as the server is down as well. We'll do everything we can to get Johnny back online as soon as possible, but it takes time to do thorough drive scans, etc. As always, if you need better uptime for your account we recommend creating an account on Ricky or Tommy. Obviously you won't be able to back up your Johnny account while the server is down though. Thank you for your patience.

It looks like Johnny crashed due to high load last night. We've got him back up and running and all services should be online soon. As usual we recommend Ricky or Tommy if you're interested in having better uptime. Thank you for your patience during this unexpected downtime.

Tommy now supports forward secrecy. Without forward secrecy if someone recorded all of your encrypted communications, and then some day was able to crack the encryption they would be able to decrypt all of the recorded data as well. With forward secrecy enabled a new key is used for each communication so an attacker would have to crack each message individually. You can read more about forward secrecy at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_secrecy You can test your site at https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/ This change on Tommy may affect people using older operating systems and older browsers. If things stop working for you let us know and if enough people have the same issue we may be forced to revert the change. Let us know if it's working for you.

We will be opening free signups on Tommy starting at midnight UTC tonight. This is the first time we've offered free signups on Tommy after we ran out of disk space a couple months ago. Since then we have only allowed donors to create new accounts. However, the gofundme campaign was a success so we were able to add more disk space to Tommy. If you aren't fast enough to snag a free signup please consider skipping the line by making donation at https://www.heliohost.org/tommy/ If you have an existing account on Johnny or Ricky let us know after you've made your donation and we can move your account to Tommy for you.

We will be rebooting Tommy shortly. We expect to only need to have the server offline for a few minutes. Thank you for your patience during this maintenance.

Another big thanks goes out to all of our donors! The money from the GoFundMe campaign has been transferred to our account, and we have purchased the rackmount network attached storage that we had planned on. The new hardware has been delivered to our datacenter, and we have a trip booked for a HelioHost admin to travel to Fremont, California to install it in our server cabinet. Once we have it installed in a few weeks we will be able to begin the process of adding more storage to Tommy, and reopen free daily signups. Next we will be doubling the storage space of all of our donors who contributed to our GoFundMe campaign. We will also begin to be able to hold on to archived accounts for longer than we currently do. We hate it when a user comes back from a long absense and wants to reactivate their account, but it's been deleted due to a lack of hard drive space. After that we will begin building our new windows server, Lily. This will allow us to provide full ASP.NET support instead of just the limited compatibility of Mono. A lot of exciting progress is in the works over the next few months.

If your account is located on the Ricky server you will now get a warning email a few days before your account goes inactive just like Tommy users have enjoyed for a while.

Johnny's crash last month scrambled the mysql innodb tables. We managed to repair them enough to get them available in read-only mode so people could take backups. Everyone who needed a backup has surely made it themselves by now, so we're bringing innodb tables back online in read-write mode. It is likely that some innodb data has been lost, but you should be able to restore the backup you took and restore your database yourself. If you failed to take a backup in the allotted time we may be able to help you. Just let us know. As always we highly recommend using myisam instead of innodb. If you have no idea what either of those are don't worry about it too much because we have myisam set as the default. Innodb is fairly delicate and pretty much anything can corrupt it causing data loss. Myisam is pretty much impossible to corrupt. We've never lost any myisam data in the entire 13 years we've been providing hosting. Innodb on the other hand crashes fairly often. Let us know if you have any questions.

We've raised the $650 we needed for the fundraiser! This means that we're going to purchase the new hardware that will allow us to give out double storage space to our GoFundMe donors, as well as re-opening free signups on Tommy. With the extra storage space we'll be able to hold on to inactive accounts for much longer than we currently do. Last but not least, we will be able to create a new server named Lily that will be running windows server 2016 as the operating system. It will take us some time to purchase the rackmount hardware, install it in our cabinet, and get everything set up. We will be contacting the GoFundMe donors via the email address they used to make the donation to let them know how our progress is coming along. We will also be posting news via our regular channels: helionet, facebook, and twitter. Thanks everyone!

https://www.heliohost.org/chat/ HelioHost now has a public discord channel. For the last 7 years or so we've used IRC to allow users to chat with each other, but we're hoping we can get a little more participation from the discord channel. To get started just go to the above link. From there you can choose to chat directly on the webpage, or you can install the discord client. There is even a phone client that you can use if you want to. Let us know if you have any questions.

https://www.gofundme.com/heliohosts-lily-server-and-storage-increase HelioHost has created a GoFundMe to purchase a new server. We're going to name this server Lily, and our plan is to begin offering Windows hosting in addition to the Linux hosting we already offer. This will allow us to provide even more features than we already do. If you're interested in getting an account on this new server please donate today. Also included in this server purchase we will be gaining 8 TB of storage that we can use to increase storage space on our existing accounts. Available harddrive space is really low right now, and as a result we've had to discontinue free account creations on our flagship server, Tommy. If you're interested in getting a Tommy account, or if you want more storage space on your existing Johnny, Ricky, or Tommy account please donate today.

Please join me in congratulating our newest HelioHost staff promotion: Wolstech is now a Root Admin! He is only the 4th person who has reached this rank in the history of HelioHost. Wolstech's contributions to HelioHost are too numerous to iterate, but most recently and most notably he is the one who created HelioMine. As the user with the 4th highest number of posts many of you have probably been personally helped by this prolific poster as well. Wolstech started out way back in 2009 the same way as all of the HelioHost admins do, as a regular user. After creating a hosting account and a forum account he gradually began helping out on the forums, and here we are almost 3000 days later and he's still helping others out. As a huge thank you for everything he's done and continues to do he now holds the root passwords to all of our servers. We feel that we can trust him, and this is the last tool we can give him to help people even more. This is just the start for Wolstech though. There is a lot left to learn about how HelioHost works behind the scenes before he can realize his full potential. Wolstech's expertise is Windows servers, but HelioHost (currently) only has Linux servers. We're hoping to be able to purchase a windows server next for him to administrate. We get the question all the time, "How do I become an admin?" The answer is simple. Do exactly what Wolstech has done. Just help people out on the forums, and we'll notice. We all volunteer our time to keep HelioHost great, and if you volunteer your time we'll give you more tools to help out even more. We all started out exacty like you: Just regular users who stumbled upon this free hosting service. We're a community of users helping each other not a company. You are what makes us great. Wolstech is definitely what makes HelioHost great.

We've noticed that Google Chrome and Windows Defender have started flagging HelioMine as malware on some people's computers. We assure you it is safe and it does exactly what we say it does: downloads a mining assignment and then uses your cpu to mine cryptocurrency for HelioHost. Unfortunately some hackers have hidden similar mining software inside other installers without telling people so some antivirus think that all miners are unwanted now. If we're telling you exactly what it's doing it's clearly not malware, but apparently intent doesn't weigh into these calculations. Anyways, even if your miner was working fine you may want to check it again in case it has stopped working. In which case you'll need to whitelist it for it to start again. We have uploaded a new version of the installer that should make it easier to whitelist it without getting blocked. So far HelioMine users have earned us over $50. It would be great if we could get even more people mining though, because $50 is a lot, but we need nearly $600 each month to break even. Thanks to all of our donors and all of our miners for helping out.

We have finished the maintenance on Eddie, and both Tommy and Cody are fully online. However, due to a severe shortage of hard drive space on Tommy we're going to have to temporarily disable free signups.

We will be taking Tommy and Cody offline for a while to perform maintenance on the Eddie server. This means everyone who has an account on Tommy will be offline, and our main website, forum, and wiki will also be offline. We'll try to get the maintenance done as quickly as possible.

There is only seven days left to get your tax deductible donations to HelioHost in for 2017. https://www.heliohost.org/donate/ December is traditionally the biggest month for philanthropy due to everyone being in the giving mood because of Christmas. If you're looking for a good charity to donate to for a larger deduction on your 2017 taxes HelioHost is a great cause. We provide free hosting to tens of thousands of users in nearly every country on the planet, and it's because of wonderful donors such as yourself that make this all possible. If you can't make a monetary donation but still want to help out consider running our https://www.heliohost.org/heliomine/ program. So far this month HelioHost users have mined over $30 USD worth of cryptocurrency for us at no cost to them. Happy holidays everyone!

Tommy has been upgraded to the latest version of Apache Tomcat. This version came out less than two weeks ago. We were using tomcat 8.5.4 previously which came out over a year ago on 2016-07-12. We figured it was time for an upgrade. You can read the changes between 8.5.4 and 8.5.24 at https://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-8.5-doc/changelog.html Since this is a fairly minor update we don't forsee any complications for the deployed java applications on Tommy. If you have any questions or issues though feel free to let us know.

That's right. HelioHost now accepts donations in Bitcoins. People have been asking for this for a long time. We're happy to oblige. BTC: 1Q53Yrkodojr9WGTUULJAgY8hZzMAeFpvr We also support several altcoins if you happen to have them. Currently, we support: Aeon (AEON): WmsynkkWmQ5eTk8D3sPHccE1WZdFhpKXgS3oXLgv2UpE8e2tkgwQSaW4HQQgZ4pdySCCGLPkyRjN6cbaLK1hq1Vr29prR7YuUElectroneum (ETN): etnjvLmSGH8Adxd82FUZN1bv9ADuGzXeJYbaKscGwqSPgT9iaLzQkifeCbiu3NK7ziV26QmkHsz3X24wFjJ58Uzn3tpgJ1k912Monero (XMR): 4AKvpoG16SWN6oppdymGVnFhuFPAtEQD1BCzkcJ3TJbngPsn4e2UoFwaWRV7bHkQNJLXofhUxJVQs4WGpPar4hqrSYtEQjh