HelioHost

It looks like Johnny apache crashed overnight. We've determined the cause and it should be fixed. We will be monitoring the situation to make sure another problem doesn't arise. Thank you for your patience during this unexpected downtime.

As you may have noticed, we have been the target of several DDoS attacks over the last couple days. If you're concerned about the uptime of your websites we recommend setting up cloudflare on your domains. This will help keep your static resources online during an attack. If you're the one responsible for the attacks just know that we're willing to talk to you. If there is a site that we host who has upset there is a chance that they have violated our terms of service and we could simply suspend the one account instead of taking down thousands of websites. One DDoS attack we endured was because his website was suspended automatically by our server for causing high load. Once we explained that to him and showed him how to edit his code to reduce load everyone was happy. All of our servers, with the exception of Ricky who is down for maintenance, are now back online and fully functional. Thanks for your patience during this unexpected downtime.

We have installed Python 3.6.1 on Johnny. You can access it at /usr/bin/python3.6 We installed this at the request of one of our users. If you have any suggestions of something that we should install or upgrade let us know and we'll see what we can do.

We've been doing much better financially over the last few months. So a huge thank you to everyone who has made a donation. HelioHost is still losing money though, but not nearly as much as before. A couple months ago we decided to be more transparent with our finances since we are a donation funded service, and we think our donors deserve to know how we're doing. You can find our news post about it here. http://www.helionet.org/index/topic/27763-heliohost-finances/ In May we only lost $6.15 and in June we appear to have only lost $17.29, but that value could still change depending on whether Google decides to invalidate any of our ad revenue. That's not too bad at all, and we've come a long way from losing several hundred dollars per month like we used to. However, in order to continue to buy new hardware and improve our service we're going to need to not just break even, but become profitable again. Hopefully we'll get there soon, but at least you all can rest easy knowing that if we can continue getting really close to breaking even like this we'll stay in business for many years to come. If we had just had 36 more people donate $1.00 through paypal we would have broken even, or if only 25 more people had made a $1.00 donation through https://www.heliohost.org/donate/ we would have broken even. That's less than 1% of our active users making a minimum donation. So like we said we're really close. The HelioHost admins have tons of ideas for this company, and the future is looking pretty bright. We're excited to roll out more improvements over the coming months. Stay tuned.

Please download your backups at https://www.heliohost.org/backup/ The automated backup process is now complete. Any mysql databases were saved as .sql files in your archive. All of your files and databases were compressed using .tar.gz format. This type of archive can be extracted using a command like tar zxvf username.tar.gz or if you use windows you might need to download some software, such as http://www.7-zip.org/download.html Let us know if you need any help with anything.

We have managed to get Ricky back online and functional, but he's still having a lot of issues. There are tons of errors going on behind the scenes which are causing him to run very slowly, and we suspect that these same errors have been causing stability issues for weeks. The issue is likely hardware related so our suggestion is to backup your accounts and move to Tommy or Johnny before things get any worse. We have disabled new account creations on Ricky for the time being.

Ricky is having some pretty serious issues. We're trying to get him back online as soon as possible, but it may be a while still.

We filed the paperwork with the US government and we are now officially a 501[c][3] not-for-profit public charity organization. For years now HelioHost has been saying that we operate as a non-profit organization, but that just means we operated as one, not that we were officially one. Now the IRS officially sees us as a 509(a)(2) public charity. This means anyone who lives in the US can deduct their HelioHost donations from their taxes when they file them with the IRS. It really doesn't change a thing in how HelioHost operates, but it's just more proof, verified by the government, that we are different from all the other for-profit hosting companies. We may be the only non-profit hosting company in the world. Thank you everyone for your donations to keep us operational! https://www.heliohost.org/donate/

HelioHost now supports the flask web framework on Tommy and Ricky. Flask is based on the Werkzeug toolkit and Jinja2 template engine. Applications that use the Flask framework include Pinterest, LinkedIn, and more. Flask is called a micro framework because it does not require particular tools or libraries. It has no database abstraction layer, form validation, or any other components where pre-existing third-party libraries provide common functions. However, Flask supports extensions that can add application features as if they were implemented in Flask itself. Extensions exist for object-relational mappers, form validation, upload handling, various open authentication technologies and several common framework related tools. This new feature is brand new, and still being tested. If you want to help us test it out create an account on Tommy or Ricky and check out our quick guide to getting a flask page up and running http://www.helionet.org/index/topic/27822-how-do-i-use-flask-on-johnny/?p=128919

It is now easier than ever to get an account on our flagship server Tommy. Find out what thousands of other users already know: Tommy is the best! We've been offering a Tommy invitation to anyone who makes a donation of $1.00 USD or more now since August 2016, and now we're proud to announce that we've improved the donation procedure even more. No longer do you have to fool around with Paypal or Skrill; we can now accept payments from any Visa, MasterCard, Discover, or American Express cards directly on our secure homepage. Not only that, but instead of having to wait for up to 24 hours for Paypal to let us know the transaction has gone through our system instantly validates your payment. Instead of having to wait for an admin to manually send out the invitation it now gets sent out immediately and is fully automated. Instead of having to pay massive fees of up to 33% to Paypal we now get a low 3% fee. If you don't have a credit card and insist on using Paypal or Skrill we'll definitely still accept your donation and send you an invite, but more of your donation will actually make it to us if you use this new system. As far as security goes we're 100% PCI compliant to accept credit card donations. None of your personal information or card numbers are stored in our system in any way, and all data is fully encrypted as it's being transferred. https://www.heliohost.org/tommy/ Let us know if you have any questions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HelioHost Check out our new article regarding the history of HelioHost that has just been published. A lot of the history of our company was unknown even to a lot of the HelioHost admins so this might be an interesting read for all of you too. Since wikipedia is a community powered organization just like HelioHost we thought it was a great place to publish this information. Hopefully the article is up to the high standards that wikipedia holds, and doesn't get deleted immediately. If the link doesn't work for you then I guess that's what happened.

You may now create an account on our newest server, Ricky. Like Tommy this new server is a stable production type server, but the main difference is Ricky does not provide Java, Aspx, or RoR. These services use a lot of memory, cpu, and cause high load. By omitting them from this new server we should be able to provide stable PHP and Mysql hosting, which are the two services that get used the most, to an even larger number of people. Ricky offers instant domain set ups, rather than having to wait up to 24 hours like on Johnny. Ricky also offers PHP 5.4, PHP 5.5, PHP 5.6, PHP 7.0, and PHP 7.1 and you can choose which version to use through cpanel just like Tommy. Ricky provides MySQL 5.6 with remote connections enabled, and Postgresql 9.2.18 with remote connections enabled. Ricky provides 1000 megabytes of file and database space just like Johnny and Tommy. Unlimited subdomains, unlimited addon domains, and unlimited parked domains. All users who create an account on Ricky will have a free comodo ssl certificate installed and updated when it gets close to expiring automatically. Ricky supports SNI just like Johnny and Tommy so you'll be able to use https without a dedicated IP. Like Tommy, Ricky will provide virus scanning of all of your mail, files, and uploads etc. Like Tommy and Johnny you will be able to install most common php scripts easily, like Wordpress and Joomla, with Softaculous. You will also be able to configure Cloudflare through cPanel with the plugin. For old users who remember and people who have read reviews regarding the Stevie server, Ricky is essentially the same as Stevie was. He's even running on the same hardware, but we've upgraded and reconfigured him so much that we decided he needed a new name. You can get all this and more for free by creating an account on Ricky today. Let us know if you have any questions.

Everyone who creates an account now gets free ssl certificates on Ricky and Tommy. Users on Johnny can still use free Let's Encrypt certificates on their shared IPs, but you will need to install them yourselves and keep them updated. AutoSSL is already enabled on all existing, and newly created Tommy accounts. When Ricky goes live he will also offer free https on all domains. If you have any questions please let us know.

We're setting up a new server named Ricky and want to know your opinion on how it should be configured. Vote today! http://www.helionet.org/index/topic/27984-opinions-wanted-php-version-for-upcoming-server/

Please join me in congratulating the newest member of the Heliohost support staff, Luigi123. 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. We get the question quite often, "How do I get promoted?" and the answer is actually quite simple: Just help people. That's exactly what Luigi123 has done. As Luigi123 has probably learned, volunteering your time at Heliohost has many benefits. Not only do you get the feeling of satisfaction for helping other members of the Heliohost community, but you also learn a lot in the process. You can also earn yourself the extra access benefits of being promoted. This is a great time to be a member of the Heliohost community as we basically start over from scratch and begin rebuilding with the help of our most devoted users. We hope to continue purchasing more servers, and expanding our services. That means we're going to continue needing more and more moderators to help out on the forums, and admins to take care of the maintenance and upgrades to the servers themselves. 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. It 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 Luigi123, it's because of users like you that makes Heliohost great, and ensures that this free service will exist for many years to come.

HelioHost has decided to be more transparent about our financial situation. The fact of the matter is we're running out of money pretty quickly. It costs us nearly $600.00 USD each month to continue providing great free hosting to people from all around the world. We've been doing this for 12 years now, but the last 2 years we've lost money. The advertising revenue just isn't keeping up with the bills anymore. Rather than slowly dwindle and fade into history we've decided to fight back by buying a new server, and expanding/improving our service. December of 2016 has been our most profitable month in years, and it was because of all of you, our users. We never had any idea that you all could be so generous with your donations. Thank you so much. It has given us quite a bit of hope and a renewed sense of purpose to continue. The fact of the matter however, is we've been in the red for quite a while now, and the money we have in our accounts won't keep us operational forever. It is very expensive to operate a webhosting service, and our only sources of income have always been advertising and donations. Not everyone can afford to pay for hosting. We understand. That's why we believe in what we do, but if you're fortunate enough to be able help us stay in business we would really appreciate anything you can spare. We can receive donations via Paypal or Skrill sent to the address admin@heliohost.org. In order to keep our faithful users updated on our status we've created a new graphic that shows exactly where we stand for the month. If we don't reach our goal we lose money, and we take a step towards going out of business. If we reach the goal by the end of the month we stay in business for at least a month longer. It's as simple as that. If we exceed our goal you can be certain we're going to put all of our profits into providing even better service and maybe even buying more servers in the future. Nobody is getting rich off of HelioHost. We're all volunteers, but we love what we do, and we hope you appreciate what we provide without a price tag.

Free signups for the all new Johnny will open in a few minutes. This server offers Ruby on Rails, ASP.net .aspx, Java .war, .jsp, PHP 5.6 .php, Python .py, Perl .pl, Ruby .rb, CGI, Cron, MySQL, Postgresql, Softaculous, cPanel, 1gb of storage, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited domains, etc. Johnny is our experimental server which means that he supports pretty much everything that Heliohost has to offer, and also offers considerably more free signups per day than our other servers. For now Johnny will also support instant domain activation, but as load increases we will undoubtedly have to revert this to domains being activated within 24 hours like we used to have. If you have any questions or concerns please let us know.

You can now develop your Heliohost websites with the Python web framework Django. Many famous sites such as https://www.instagram.com/ and https://www.pinterest.com/ are built with Django. This powerful web framework makes it easier to build better web apps more quickly and with less code. Django is a high-level Python web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design. Built by experienced developers, it takes care of much of the hassle of web development, so you can focus on writing your app without needing to reinvent the wheel. If you want to give Django a try you can get started quickly and easily by following these instructions. Once you have this basic test working on your Heliohost account you should visit https://www.djangoproject.com/ to read their excellent documentation and continue learning. We recommend developing your Django applications on your home computer where you have command line access, and then uploading your files to the server. Our server uses Python 3.6.0 and Django 1.10.5 so make sure you use the same on your development environment or you may end up with compatibility issues. Like most of our improvements this functionality was requested by one of our users, and we were more than happy to install it for you. Let us know if you have any other ideas on how we can improve our free hosting service.

As requested by one of our users Heliohost has installed Python 3.6.0 on Tommy. If you have an account on this server you can use the new version of python by using the #!/usr/bin/python3.6 shebang line. Let us know if you have any questions or need help getting started with python scripting. Thanks for the great suggestions from our users. Let us know if you need anything else installed, and we'll see what we can do.

You can now create a Heliohost account with a gmx.com email account. The Heliohost admins have been rather perplexed as to why gmx.com was refusing our emails, but the mystery has now been solved. The problem was gmx.com is very rigidly interpreting RFC 2822.2.1.1 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2822#section-2.1.1 which states that no lines in an email can exceed the length of 1000 characters. Gmx.com is the only email provider we know of that enforces this line length requirement. The result was our emails were being refused and wouldn't end up in the inbox or spam box or anywhere. After combing through gigabytes of log files by hand the vague error message was found. All of Heliohost's emails should now conform to this archaic rule which means they should end up in even more inboxes than before. A big thanks goes out to our users for pointing out this issue, and as always please let us know if you're having trouble receiving our emails.

You can now request Java Tomcat access on your account at https://tommy.heliohost.org:2083/frontend/paper_lantern/java/index.live.php Java (.jsp and .war) is one of our most sought after features, and we may be the only free hosting service in the world that provides it. Unfortunately it doesn't scale well on a shared host so we can only enable it on a limited number of accounts at a time. This new cPanel plugin is how you let us know that you need access. In the recent Johnny crash we lost a lot of our custom code so this Java request page had to be rewritten from scratch. Let us know if you have any problems with the java requesting process.

Tommy signups filled in 6.049 seconds today! That's a lot of accounts created in a very short amount of time. Obviously our free hosting is very popular lately, but not a single person who has managed to get a Tommy account has been disappointed. We think you'll agree that Tommy is well worth the wait. To make your chances of getting account a little easier we've implemented a new refresh button on the server selection page. As midnight UTC approaches you can just mash the refresh button until a free account is available at which point the refresh button will automatically change into a next button and Tommy will be selected by default so you don't even need to worry about accidentally refreshing the page instead of creating an account. We've also once again increased the number of free accounts allowed each day by a considerable amount. Tommy has been handling the onslaught of hundreds of new accounts and all the domains that come along with them like a champ. We understand the frustration of trying and failing for days on end to get an account, but it's a delicate balancing act to allow as many new accounts as possible without causing high load and downtime for the existing accounts. As always if you don't want to join the attempt-to-get-a-free-account madness you can always skip the line by making a donation of any amount at https://heliohost.org/donate We greatly appreciate anything that you can spare, and 100% of donations go towards paying the bills to keep the lights on, improving our service, and repairing our servers. Thanks.

Due to overwhelming demand Heliohost is increasing the number of free Tommy signups that will be made available each day. Keep in mind that as has been the case for a while now, anyone who donates any amount to Heliohost https://heliohost.org/donate/ will receive a Tommy invitation that can be used at any time that is convenient to you. If you don't want to or can't donate you can still receive the exact same quality of account on our newest and greatest flagship server Tommy for free by creating your account https://heliohost.org/signup/ at midnight UTC. Be aware that signups fill incredibly fast though. So fast in fact that our server monitor http://heliohost.grd.net.pl/monitor/ has been unable to detect it with the two minute resolution that it uses for the last three days. It's a delicate balancing act to keep our servers performing well without overloading them with thousands of accounts, but Tommy has been handling the load well so far. We have no intention of allowing Tommy to become so overworked that his uptime starts to falter, but at the same time we understand your frustration of being unable to create an account at all. With that in mind we have increased the daily signup limit. We know you will love your Tommy account.

Heliohost is happy to announce that we have recovered some additional data from the Stevie server during the recent attempt to manually backup user requested files. Unfortunately we weren't able to backup everything that was requested because the hard drives are too badly damaged, but everything that can possibly be recovered is now available for download. The manually archived data can be retrieved using the same https://heliohost.org/backup/ page as before. Some users will now have multiple files in their backup directory so if you remove the filename, everything after the /, in your backup link you will be able to see the index page listing all of the files. Let us know if you need any help accessing your backup files, or have any questions. The usernames who did and didn't receive any additional data can be found at http://www.helionet.org/index/topic/27233-manual-backup-results/

Heliohost has decided to start allowing a few free Tommy accounts each day since it might be a while before we can get Johnny and Stevie running again. New account signups will open in a few minutes, and then each day they will open at midnight UTC. If you're not fast enough or lucky enough or you just don't want to wait until a certain time of the day to create your account we will still be offering Tommy invites to anyone who makes a donation of any amount. Keep in mind that donations that are much less than $1.00 USD will result in $0.00 received by Heliohost because Paypal will take all the money in fees. Since Heliohost receives no money from these small donations we will refund the donation back to you and you won't receive an invitation. Sorry, but we only give out invitations for donations of any amount to Heliohost, not donations to Paypal.