HelioHost

Johnny seems to be having some high load issues. We've disabled new account signups on Johnny, and will be doing some re-configuring on the server over the next few days to help improve uptime.

Download your Stevie backup at https://heliohost.org/backup/ The Heliohost admins can now confirm that the reason Stevie crashed and the reason he won't boot up anymore is because his hard drive has failed. Since Stevie won't boot on his own we had to devise a way to access his failing hardware with the goal of backing up as much user data as we could. A custom backup script was written that scoured Stevie's broken partitions as quickly as possible to save as much data as we could. This script transferred the data off Stevie and compressed it to save space, and you can access your archive with the above link. As always we recommend all of our users take frequent backups of their sites in the rare case that something like this could happen, but we have done everything we can to salvage as much user data as possible. If your file is missing something it is most likely because the hard drive is too corrupted, but if you would like to request an admin try to manually backup some specific data please open a support ticket by posting at http://www.helionet.org/index/forum/45-customer-service/ We recommend using your backup to create a new account on Johnny or Tommy. The Stevie backups will only be available for a limited time as we don't have an infinite amount of space to host them all. We will be replacing Stevie's hard drive and rebuilding him the next time an admin visits California. If you need help with anything just let us know. Thank you for your patience and understanding during this very unexpected hardware failure.

We've heard from a lot of Heliohost users who want to make a donation to help keep us in business but are unable or unwilling to use Paypal to send money which was our only way of receiving donations. Paypal doesn't work in a lot of countries, and Heliohost has users from all over the world. We've however managed to add twenty more countries to the list of places we can receive donations from by creating an official Heliohost Skrill account. Heliohost has been experiencing some rough times lately as we've had multiple hardware failures which have been costly to repair. Unfortunately we've been losing money as our ad revenue hasn't been enough to pay the bills. If you appreciate the free hosting we've provided for the last 11 years we urge you to help us continue operation. As a token of our appreciation we will send you an invite to our newest flagship server, Tommy, to anyone who donates any amount. We can now receive money from Bangladesh, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Ivory Coast, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Ghana, Haiti, Lebanon, Liberia, Moldova, Monaco, Montenegro, Myanmar, Pakistan, Paraguay, Saint Lucia, Timor-Leste, Uzbekistan, and Zimbabwe. In fact that leaves only seven countries in the world from which we can't receive donations. That's means we now have more than 96% of the world's countries covered. The notable exceptions are countries that have strict US sanctions like North Korea, and Iran. Also extremely volatile, war-torn areas like Syria are not supported. To send us money with Skrill click the link below and send the money to admin@heliohost.org, or as always use can still use Paypal too. Let us know if you have any problems with the new donation method, or have any questions. or

After a over a week of hundreds of emails back and forth between the Heliohost admins and the Hurricane Electric technicians on site in the datacenter with our servers we have made some progress with Stevie. We were able to get very limited access to Stevie's hardware, and have verified that it is possible to access the data on his hard drives. We have purchased, specially configured, and are mailing a new piece of hardware to California that the Hurricane Electric technicians can hook up to Stevie that should allow us remote access to begin taking backups of user's data. As usual, the innodb databases are probably lost, but we should be able to backup the contents of your public_html directories and your MyISAM databases. Time will tell for sure if we're able to do this, but we're hopeful and wanted to let everyone know how the progress with Stevie is going. We suspect the reason Stevie won't boot up is a hardware failure on the aging server. Stevie has been in service with the same hardware since July 21st, 2008 so he provided us with exceptional uptime for well over 8 years. That's pretty amazing for a free hosting server with over 10,000 accounts. We are planning on buying some new hardware for Stevie so that in January or February when an admin visits Stevie we will install it, and we fully intend to get him running again. In the meantime we recommend creating an account on Tommy if you need the same excellent uptime that you've enjoyed on Stevie for so many years. In fact Tommy is a huge improvement over Stevie. Not only does he offer Java .jsp/.war, and .NET .aspx like Johnny, but he also offers five different versions of PHP that you can choose from for each directory or domain that you host. Tommy also offers domain creation in 30 minutes or less instead of the standard 24 hours like previous Heliohost servers, so if you want to get your website back online as soon as possible Tommy is the way to go. On Tommy everyone can have free SSL for their domains by installing a free Let's Encrypt certificate on our SNI enabled system instead of having to pay $12 for a dedicated IP like you used to need to do on Stevie. With multiple hardware issues on our servers lately we are losing money and are at risk of going out of business entirely. So if you can please send us a donation of whatever you can spare to https://www.paypal.me/HelioHost it will go a long way to keep Heliohost in existence and will allow us to continue providing free hosting to everyone around the world who aren't so lucky to be able to afford to donate. We appreciate any donation no matter how large or small you can afford. Within 24 hours of making your donation we will send an exclusive invitation at the email address you sent the donation from to create an account on Tommy whenever is convenient to you. If you want to reuse your username, or domains from Stevie just let us know and we can help you transfer them. It should go without saying, but we're doing everything we can to get you your data from his hard drives and get him back up and running as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience and understanding during this very unexpected downtime on Stevie.

Great news everybody! We've been rebuilding Johnny, and are now ready to allow a few people to start creating accounts. As soon as Stevie started crashing http://heliohost.grd.net.pl/monitor/archive/?2016-11-30 the Heliohost administrators immediately began work getting Johnny set up again. We gave Johnny users 72 days to take backups of their old accounts, but the old version of Johnny has now been completely wiped removing all traces of the broken server. However, if you failed to take a backup of your site during the allotted time we may still have some archived information for you. Just make a post on our support forum http://helionet.org/ to inquire about the status of a backup. We don't have infinite storage space on our servers, but we tried to back up as many accounts that were active when Johnny crashed as we could. If you had an account on Johnny and would like to start using it again you will need to sign up again, and then restore your backup. Your old account will not be automatically created for you. The signups per day on Johnny will start out limited in number as we continue getting the server functional. Not all of the work getting Johnny set up is completed, but enough is done that some users can begin creating accounts if you wish to. Let us know if you have any questions.

By now you may have noticed that Stevie didn't boot up yesterday like we were hoping. Rest assured that we're still working with the Hurricane Electric technicians on site with the server to try to get him running again. If we can get Stevie booted up we will try to give a warning via a news post before he comes back online so that the largest number of people can get their backups in case he crashes again right away. At this point if the technicians can't get Stevie running again we may have to wait until a Heliohost admin visits California to see what we can do with the server in person. Our deepest apologies for the inconvenience this unexpected downtime has caused. It really caught us by surprise as Stevie has had 99%+ uptime for every month for the last 6 years or so. There was no warning whatsoever prior to the first crash.

We are working towards and are hopeful to get Stevie back online later this afternoon. However, we don't know how long he will stay online. We are going to immediately disable as many services as we can like new account creations, http, php, cpanel, mysql, named, cron, etc. in the hope that it will keep him from crashing again quickly. If you are able we recommend taking a backup of your account once ftp is available.

When Stevie crashed last night he was experiencing some fairly high load due to running the ns1.heliohost.org nameserver. In order to give Stevie a bit of a break we're going to leave ns1.heliohost.org offline for now. Since ns2.heliohost.org has rock solid 100% uptime the nameserver downtime shouldn't affect anyone's domains. If you're registering a new domain your registrar might give you some errors regarding ns1.heliohost.org not responding though. Let us know if you have any questions. We're hoping that the reduced load from not having to run a nameserver in addition to all of the user accounts might decrease the chance of another crash.

After analyzing and comparing the log files immediately before the last two crashes of Stevie we think that it may be an issue with a cron job that is causing the server to lock up. We have temporarily disabled new cron jobs creation, and deleted a few cron job runs that may have caused the crash. In addition to the cron job possibility we have increased the sensitivity of the automated crash prevention systems that we have in place. This may result in some 500 errors on memory intensive scripts like Roundcube webmail, during periods of low server resources. After all, a few error messages are better than twelve hours of downtime from a full crash.

Stevie has recovered from another crash. The admins have some ideas on how to prevent these crashes in the future and are implementing changes. We all hope that it doesn't happen again, but it's always a good idea to take backups of all of your information regularly even if the server isn't having issues. Our deepest apologies for the recent downtime. We're doing everything possible to keep our servers online.

Stevie has finished rebooting and services are coming back online. The Heliohost admins are looking in to why the server crashed in the first place.

It looks like Stevie is having some trouble. The Heliohost admins are working with the Hurricane Electric technicians on site with the servers to try to get him up and running again. We'll update you when we have more information.

Heliohost is proud to announce that we have a new website. Check it out at https://heliohost.org/ We've been using our old homepage for well over 7 or 8 years with very few changes, and it has obviously become very outdated. Believe it or not, but there are files on our old site dating back to 2005. With that in mind the Heliohost administrators have collaborated to create a brand new site from the ground up. This isn't just another reskin of our trusty Joomla site that we've been using for so long, but rather this is a completely new homepage. During this transition between websites we will keep both sites active while we make sure the new code is fully functional. If you go to heliohost.org you will have a 50% chance of loading either the old homepage or the new. If you need to access the old site specifically you can do so by clicking the "Classic Site" link in the footer. If you find any bugs, or if you have any comments about the new website we'd love to hear about it. You can let us know what you're thinking by posting on our support forums http://helionet.org/ A big thanks goes out to all our donors, users, and volunteer staff who keep Heliohost going and makes all these improvements possible. Thanks for being a member of the Heliohost community.

Some of the InnoDB tables on Stevie MySQL databases have become corrupted. The Heliohost admins have backed up all the salvageable InnoDB data, and removed all the corruption. What this means is some InnoDB data was probably lost during the fix. If you are missing InnoDB data simply restore your database from the most recent backup you have. As always we HIGHLY recommend using MyISAM tables in your databases because it is much more stable, and we've never lost any MyISAM data in the eleven years we've been providing free hosting services. InnoDB on the other hand is quite volatile and tends to get corrupted easily. Let us know if you need any help with any of this.

Johnny php, cpanel, and some other services are offline for now. The numerous crashes on Johnny over the last few years seem to have done irreparable damage to his filesystems and he can't carry on any longer. The hard drives all seem to be functioning properly and the data seems to be intact, but the filesystem itself is quite damaged which prevents the server from running correctly. Both the /var/ partition and the /usr/ partition are in read-only mode, but the server is technically online. We have stopped all new accounts from being created on Johnny, and we recommend current Johnny users begin backing up their data to move to Stevie or Tommy. FTP is working and we recommend using it to backup your files. Since MySQL on Johnny is offline you won't be able to backup your databases without help. Furthermore, only MyISAM tables will be able to be backed up while Johnny remains broken. If you have any InnoDB tables you'll either need to wait for Johnny to be fixed or use your most recent backup. Once everything is backed up and saved off of Johnny's system we will be decommissioning him and rebuilding him from the ground up. With the recent memory, storage, and system upgrades we have done to Johnny we think this is the best way to get him stable so we won't have to worry about him crashing all the time anymore. Let us know if you need any help with anything by posting on our support forums at http://helionet.org/ Also, our apologies for any inconvenience this downtime may cause you.

Now Johnny's /var/ partition has gone read-only suddenly without any warning. We are going to reboot Johnny immediately to scan this partition as well just like we did on the /usr/ partition. This may just be left over inconsistencies from the hard drive issues we had recently, but as always we highly recommend users take frequent backups of their site. Let us know if you have any questions, and thank you for your patience while we perform the maintenance required to keep Johnny functioning.

The /usr/ partition of Johnny went read-only on its own so we're rebooting him and doing some hard drive scans to make sure everything is ok still. This will result in some downtime, but we should have Johnny back online soon. Accounts on Stevie or Tommy won't be affected by this downtime. Let us know if you have any questions. Thank you for this patience during this system maintenance.

All free accounts on Tommy will be able to have SSL for free without purchasing a dedicated IP. The reason we're able to provide this service is because Tommy supports SNI (Server Name Indication) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication Users on Stevie and Johnny require a dedicated IP address to set them apart from the rest of the accounts on the shared IP, but with SNI any or all of the accounts on a shared IP can use https on their website. We recommend any ecommerce sites, or any site that requires a password to log in to use SSL to protect their visitors data. The dedicated IP for SSL is one of the only things we've ever charged users for because our IP provider charges us for them so we had to pass the cost along to our users without making any profit on it. Now users won't need to purchase anything to use SSL on Tommy. SNI is supported in most modern browsers. Here is a list of browser versions that will be able to browse your SNI enabled SSL protected site without warning messages: Internet Explorer 7 and laterFirefox 2Opera 8 with TLS 1.1 enabledGoogle Chrome: Supported on Windows XP on Chrome 6 and later Supported on Vista and later by default OS X 10.5.7 in Chrome Version 5.0.342.0 and later Safari 2.1 and later (requires OS X 10.5.6 and later or Windows Vista and later).Note: No versions of Internet Explorer on Windows XP support SNIMobile Safari for iOS 4.0Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) and laterWindows Phone 7Source: https://www.digicert.com/ssl-support/apache-secure-multiple-sites-sni.htm We're really excited about our newest server, Tommy, and can't wait to get him up and fully operational. As we mentioned recently we're willing to give donors early closed beta access to create a Tommy account. The details of the offer can be found here http://www.helionet.org/index/topic/25503-tommy-closed-beta We'll keep you all updated on the state of the new server as he progresses, and as we get new features installed. If you have any questions or requests for Tommy feel free to ask. Thanks for being a member of the Heliohost community.

Great news everybody! We did it! We got Johnny running again. The Heliohost admins have worked tirelessly through the night, and we're proud to announce that we have gotten Johnny working. Everything seems to be functional, and so far we haven't seen any signs of data loss. Not only that, but we have given Johnny some considerable upgrades. Johnny now has about 40% more memory than before, over twice as much storage for user accounts, and even a considerable boost to his cpu ration. This means that not only is Johnny back, but he should be much more stable and capable of handling even more user accounts. As is usual after a downtime like this we are waiving the inactivity suspensions for 30 days beginning today. We will also be reopening signups for Johnny shortly. Thank you for your patience during this ridiculously long downtime. Johnny ended up being down for 52 days from his crippling hardware failure, but we have no reason to believe that he will crash again in the foreseeable future. If you have any questions or concerns don't hesitate to ask. Thanks for being a part of the Heliohost community.

We've got an admin on site at our datacenter right now trying to get Johnny working again. Depending on what he finds we may need to take our main website http://heliohost.org/ our forums http://helionet.org/ or even Stevie server down temporarily for maintenance.

ASP.NET 4.6 will soon be available on Tommy. We use Mono 4.4.2 to provide this scripting language. Very few offer truly free ASP.NET hosting, even fewer provide cPanel in addition to ASP.NET, and HelioHost may be the only webhost in the world to offer cPanel with the cutting edge ASP.NET 4.6. You can read about the exact compatibility of our mono install at http://www.mono-project.com/docs/about-mono/compatibility/ We recommend writing and deploying your ASP.NET website using Microsoft's free Visual Studio Community version. This powerful combination of free software and free hosting will easily get even the most complex websites online quickly. Each Heliohost user has their own mono process serving their website to optimize caching and ensure the fastest speed. We're really excited about our newest server, Tommy, and can't wait to get him up and fully operational. As we mentioned recently we're willing to give donors early closed beta access to create a Tommy account. The details of the offer can be found here http://www.helionet.org/index/topic/25503-tommy-closed-beta We'll keep you all updated on the state of the new server as he progresses, and as we get new features installed. If you have any questions or requests for Tommy feel free to ask. Thanks for being a member of the Heliohost community.

On Tommy user's will be able to choose between PHP 7.0.9, 5.6.24, 5.5.38, or even 5.4.45. Heliohost users who want to use the latest cutting edge features will be able to and users who want to run older scripts will be able to as well all on the same server. In your Tommy cPanel there is a new button which allows you to set the PHP version that various sections of your account run. So maybe your tests directory uses php7, and your older scripts that use deprecated functions can run side by side on php5.4. This makes it really easy to test which versions of PHP your scripts will run on. All Tommy accounts will come with this multi-php enabled by default. We're really excited about our newest server, Tommy, and can't wait to get him up and fully operational. As we mentioned recently we're willing to give donors early closed beta access to create a Tommy account. The details of the offer can be found here http://www.helionet.org/index/topic/25503-tommy-closed-beta/ We'll keep you all updated on the state of the new server as he progresses, and as we get new features installed. If you have any questions or requests for Tommy feel free to ask. Thanks for being a member of the Heliohost community.

Java is one of our most popular features, and many users come to Heliohost specifically for the free .jsp/.war hosting so with that in mind we have installed Apache Tomcat 8.5.4 and Java 1.8.0_101-b13 on Tommy. As far as we know Heliohost is still the only truly free host in the world that provides free Java hosting without any gimmicks. If you can find someone else let us know. Our version of Tomcat was released 2016-07-12, and is the latest stable release. Our version of Java is also the latest and greatest. For comparison Johnny is running Tomcat 7, and Java 1.6.0 so Tommy is already much more up to date. Java will be enabled on Tommy user accounts on a first come first serve basis like we've always done, but since Tommy has twice as much memory as Johnny we'll be able to have a lot more Java enabled accounts at once so the wait list should be considerably shorter. We're also going to allow users to deploy two .war servlets instead of the one we allowed on Johnny. The reason is so people can have a production .war deployed, and also work on development .war at the same time. We're really excited about our newest server, Tommy, and can't wait to get him up and fully operational. As we mentioned recently we're willing to give donors early closed beta access to create a Tommy account. The details of the offer can be found here http://www.helionet.org/index/topic/25503-tommy-closed-beta/ We'll keep you all updated on the state of the new server as he progresses, and as we get new features installed. If you have any questions or requests for Tommy feel free to ask. Thanks for being a member of the Heliohost community.

You can now receive support for your Heliohost account by sending an email to support@heliohost.org. The admins have set up a new system allowing users to receive help or ask questions via email. The way it works is you simply send us an email and the system automatically assigns a tracking number and posts the received message in the new email support forum. http://www.helionet.org/index/forum/91-email-support/ As soon as the support email is received, any of our volunteer admins and helpful community can respond to the new forum post. All responses to the post will then be emailed to the address that requested the support. This exchange between forum posts and email replies can continue back and forth as long as it takes to answer the question or solve the issue. New topics in the email support forum can only be created by the Heliohost system, so consequently users will not be able to create new topics there. If you would like help through the forums you should continue using the various customer support sections that already exist. If you send a ticket to support@heliohost.org your email address will not be publicly disclosed, but any information you send will be so don't send passwords or any other sensitive information. Email has always been a very insecure way to transfer data so it's always been common sense not to send any secure information anyways. Also, if you notice that your email hasn't been posted on the forums it probably means that our spam filter has blocked it. Just send a new email without trying to sell us Viagra or whatever. If you have any questions please let us know. Thanks for being a part of the Heliohost community.

Tommy is our newest server that the Heliohost admins have been working on getting set up. However, we need our users to help us beta test him. We have decided to invite a few of our existing users to help us test things out. If you're selected you will receive an email at your cPanel contact address containing a code that will allow you to create a Tommy account before he is publicly available. The beta invites will be randomly chosen from among our current users in a way that will allow us to best test critical services. If you receive a code you aren't required to create a Tommy account, but you're certainly welcome to if you want to help. If you're interested we are also offering another way to get an invite. As you may already know Heliohost is entirely supported by donations and ad revenue. Tommy has cost us a considerable amount of money to purchase so to help thank our donors we're willing to give anyone who makes a donation a closed beta invite. There is no minimum amount required. The only thing to keep in mind is that we won't be sending all of the beta invites at the same time. We will be inviting those with the largest donations first so if you want to be one of the first to create an account on our flagship server please donate as much as you can spare. Keep in mind that the donor invite codes will be sent to the email address that you send the paypal donation from. Here is our paypal donation link: https://www.paypal.me/HelioHost We will be announcing the features of Tommy as they are finalized in future news posts. If you have any questions don't hesitate to ask.