HelioHost

Heliohost is going to be restarting our inactivity suspensions soon. You may recall that at the beginning of July we had some downtime on our main site http://heliohost.org/ Since it wasn't possible for people to renew their accounts during this downtime the Heliohost admins disabled the inactivity detection meaning that all accounts will stay active. It has now been almost a full month since we disabled inactivity suspensions and as you can see on our server monitor load on Stevie is starting to get pretty high. There has even been a few high load related downtimes for a few minutes here and there. In order to get Stevie's load back under control we will need to start suspending inactive accounts again. This is your warning. We will be suspending inactive accounts starting again in a few days. Please don't forget to log in to your account by going to http://heliohost.org/ at least once every 30 days to keep your account active. If you forget to log in you can reactivate your account by going to http://www.heliohost.org/home/support/scripts/renew

Heliohost has switched mailservers from Courier to Dovecot. This should result in increased performance especially of the IMAP protocol. Our Courier install was getting bogged down in the number of IMAP connections that we constantly have to our servers, and resulted in a lot of slow performance and errors for our users. Already it seems like the switch has helped with these issues. Let us know if you have any problems with the new mailserver. Thanks for being a member of the Heliohost community.

We're proud to announce that Heliohost has purchased a new server! Say hello to Eddie. We have transfered Cody over to the new machine. Cody is the server that runs our core sites: http://heliohost.org/ http://helionet.org/ http://wiki.helionet.org/ etc. As you may have noticed these sites uptime, speed, and stability have improved drastically. We've been moving pieces over to the new server bit by bit, and are now ready to announce that the first phase of our growth is complete. This new server is much more powerful than any of our previous servers. For instance, the uptime of our homepage http://heliohost.org/ has gone from about 95% and loading pretty slow, to 100% uptime and loading nice and fast. We've got a ton of great upgrades in store for you. The most exciting of which are the new servers. The Heliohost admins have been working hard since February to expand our collocation cabinet space, physically move the servers to their new location, upgrade our electricity plan, make sure our bandwidth is sufficient to support more servers, purchase the new server which we named Eddie, and set it all up. It took months of work, and a lot of money, but our plans are now approaching fruition. Stay tuned for the newest server in our Heliohost family that users will be able to create accounts on: Tommy. If you'd like to know how you can help out with the new server please read: http://www.helionet.org/index/topic/23117-new-server/ Thanks for being a part of the Heliohost community.

Due to the hardware failure we lost some of our main accounts database information. What this means to users is that some of the Stevie accounts that are currently inactive will not be able to use the renew script to reactivate their account. If your site is showing a suspended for inactivity page, and the renew script says that your account is already active, and you can't reset your password please open a support ticket on our forums http://helionet.org/ or get in touch with us through social media and a support admin will be able to manually reactivate your account for you. Thanks for your patience and understanding following this major unexpected hardware failure.

Great news everyone! Our homepage http://heliohost.org/ which has been showing a "down for maintenance" message for a few days is now back online. Through a collaborative effort from the Heliohost admins we managed to restore the site from backups. The main benefit of having our homepage back online is new users can now create accounts again. Let us know if you find anything that isn't working as expected. Thank you for your patience and understanding during this downtime.

The Heliohost admins have a plan to transfer the Johnny server from the failing hard drive to a new stable hard drive as soon as possible. For now though we're going to leave the Johnny server offline because there is a possibility that each boot and each crash could be causing more and more damage to the data stored on the damaged hard drive. Unfortunately this transfer is going to take some time as it requires a technician on site. Once Johnny is transferred we hope that there will be no data loss, but at this point it's impossible to say for sure what is left intact. The Johnny daily signups have been suspended, and the Stevie daily signups have been increased by nearly 200% to compensate for our temporary reduction in available servers. If you would like to transfer your account from Johnny to Stevie the Heliohost admins are standing by to assist you. What you need first is your most recent Johnny backup, and then you can restore it to your new Stevie account. If you don't have a recent backup you have two choices:a ) Wait for Johnny to come back online, or b ) recreate your site from scratch on Stevie. If you run into any errors creating your new Stevie account please let us know as there might be conflicts between your Johnny account and your new account. If so the Heliohost admins can help fix it for you. Just open a support ticket on our forums at http://helionet.org/ If you have any questions don't hesitate to ask. Thank you for your patience and understanding during this unexpected hardware failure.

Johnny is booting up as I type. It's a miracle! Just when everyone had given up on Johnny ever coming back online he decided to wake up from his nap. We strongly recommend backing up for your Johnny account as soon as you regain access. Who knows how long he'll be online for.

Johnny has crashed again. We suspect that it might be a hard drive going bad on our Charlie server which means that Johnny and Cody are both down for now. Cody is the server that runs our main website http://heliohost.org/ so we have moved that domain to a temporary maintenance page. We're hoping to have everything up and running again soon, but it might take onsite hardware repairs to get this accomplished. Thank you for your patience and understanding while we work to get this resolved.

Due to high load Johnny experienced some considerable downtime today, and we were forced to reboot him. While we were at it we rebooted Charlie and Cody too. Charlie and Cody are both online and fully functional already, and Johnny is booting up. Expect some high load and instability on the Johnny server for a while following the reboot.

It's now easier than ever to request Java/JSP to be installed on your Johnny account. Heliohost is proud to be one of the only, if not the only, free host for Java Tomcat Servlets and Java Server Page (.jsp) files. The reason other hosts don't offer Java for free is because it doesn't scale well on shared hosting environments, and there are many complications involved in deploying it. Heliohost, through thousands of lines of custom code, has made it possible for anyone to host .jsp files and java servlets for free. For years now, if you wanted java to be enabled on your Heliohost account you had to request it on the forums, and wait for a support admin to manually install it for you. This process was very time consuming, slow, and required a lot of work by the Heliohost staff. We have now implemented a way for Johnny users to request java with a single click. All you have to do is go to http://johnny.heliohost.org:2082/frontend/x3/java/index.live.php and click "Request Java/JSP." You will instantly be added to the java request queue, and the automated system processes which we have refined through trial and error for years will install java on your account once Johnny has enough system resources. This new system will also greatly increase the rate at which new accounts receive their java support which is wonderful news for a lot of people, because you may have noticed that there haven't been a lot of java installations lately. Our previous java system broke a few weeks ago, and it was no longer possible to add any new accounts. The entire system has been redesigned and rebuilt from the ground up with speed and automation in mind. Let us know if you have any problems with the new request page, or with your java support once it's enabled. Thanks for being a member of the Heliohost community.

Heliohost is proud to introduce the newest cPanel theme: Paper Lantern. If you'd like to try out the new theme first log in to your cPanel account at http://heliohost.org/ Next click the drop down theme selector at the top of the screen and select the paper_lantern option. We recommend this new responsive theme for users who want to view their cPanel through their mobile devices, tablets, or high resolution desktops. If you're using a smaller resolution laptop, or if you're used to your current cPanel you may prefer to stick with the old x3 theme. If you have any problems with the new themes or changing your theme please don't hesitate to let us know by making a post on our support forums located at http://helionet.org/ Thanks for being a part of the Heliohost community.

Heliohost is proud to announce that our support forums http://helionet.org/ have been upgraded. This upgrade should result in a considerable speed and stability improvements. We have also managed to fix a lot of the old bugs that have been around for years. Let us know if you find anything broken about the new forums, and we'll do our best to fix it. As always thanks for being a member of the Heliohost community.

We've received a few reports of InnoDB tables on Stevie losing their data from the recent MySQL crash. It looks like affected users will need to restore their databases from their most recent backup. If you need help with this process don't hesitate to open a support ticket at http://helionet.org/ and our support admins will be happy to help. As always Heliohost STRONGLY recommends using MyISAM for your databases because InnoDB is far to fragile for a production website. If you even look at it wrong it has a tendency to break. MyISAM on the other hand is incredibly durable, and in the eleven years we've been operating not a single MyISAM database has been corrupted or lost data. If you need help converting your InnoDB database to MyISAM we'd be happy to help with that too. Thanks for your patience and understanding during this crash recovery period.

Mysql on Stevie crashed yesterday, and the user database got corrupted. The Heliohost admins have worked tirelessly overnight to get Stevie's Mysql back up and running. However, the user corruption means that each user will have to delete, recreate, and grant permissions to each database user that should have access to each Mysql database. If you need help getting your site back online please don't hesitate to open a support ticket by posting at http://helionet.org/ Our friendly support admins will be happy to help. Thank you for your patience and understanding during this Mysql downtime.

The issue affecting the use of 'localhost' versus '127.0.0.1' to connect to MySQL on the Johnny server has been fixed. If you're unaware of what this post is about, Johnny got conked on the head pretty hard and forgot what localhost meant. We have gently reconked Johnny's head and reminded him. The fix for this was simply to use 127.0.0.1 instead, but some users don't know how to change this. Now using either MySQL host option should work. Let us know if you're still having any issues connecting to MySQL. Thanks for being a part of the Heliohost community.

We will be rebooting the Johnny server today as a part of routine maintenance. The reboot will result in some downtime followed by a period of increased server load. Thanks for your patience and understanding during this system maintenance.

Call or text us at +1-802-88-HELIO (+1-802-884-3546). Heliohost now has a phone number so that you can call us! You asked for it, and now you receive it. By popular demand you can now call 24/7 and leave us a message, or you can text us at any time. If your message is in English and we can understand it, we will respond via text message as soon as possible. Likewise if you don't want to call and leave a voicemail you can also text us for support at the same number. Obviously, standard call and text prices will depend on your phone service. If your phone isn't capable of receiving text messages, or your phone number is blocked we won't be able to respond to you, but we do still appreciate the call. Let us know if you have any questions. Thanks for being a part of the Heliohost community!

The good news is that our main site http://heliohost.org/ and our support forums http://helionet.org/ are now back online and fully functional. Johnny is booting up, and should be fully functional as well within a few hours. When Johnny crashed we thought it would be a perfect opportunity to perform some scheduled upgrades on both Johnny and Cody that we had been planning to do for a while anyways. That way we could just have one downtime instead of several. Unfortunately, the bad news is our upgrades have not yet occurred. The first step in the upgrade process was to move Cody from his existing location on Charlie to our brand new server, Eddie. We were able to backup Cody successfully, but the transfer process from Charlie to Eddie has now unexpectedly failed twice. Rather than extend the downtime even further by trying the same transfer a third time we decided to cut our losses, and put things back the way they were. We will still be performing the upgrades, but they will have to wait for a later date. Thanks for your patience and understanding during this extended downtime, and as always thanks for being a part of the Heliohost community.

Johnny has crashed, and is unresponsive to our efforts to reboot him. It looks like all of the user accounts and data is still intact, but he just won't boot up. The next steps we need to take to get Johnny back online will also unfortunately take Cody offline for some downtime. As usual, Stevie will not be affected by any of this downtime in any way. During the intermittant downtime on Cody our main website, heliohost.org, and our support forums, helionet.org, will also be offline. Follow us on twitter, , or like us on Facebook, http://facebook.com/HelioHost-133105633434140/ , for the latest updates on this server maintenance during the Cody downtime.

The servers are now all located in Heliohost's new cabinet, and the extended server maintenance is complete. Charlie and Cody are back online, and Johnny will soon be online and fully functional as well. Our sincerest apologies on the length of the downtime. We had hoped to get everything moved quickly in a matter of hours, but as is usually the case with complicated endeavours such as this there were complications. The Stevie move went smoothly, but Charlie, Johnny, and Cody caused us quite a bit of issues. Everything seems to be resolved now. Big thanks go out to Ashoat, the founder of Heliohost, for traveling nearly 3000 miles to move the servers, and take the first steps towards setting up our new server. Many thanks also go out to the Hurricane Electric technicians who provided us with plenty of tireless on-site assistance working out the kinks in the three malfunctioning servers. Last but not least thanks go out to the Heliohost community for making this all possible. If it wasn't for our users we wouldn't exist at all let alone be upgrading and expanding our services. Let us know if you have questions, and as always thanks for being a part of the Heliohost community.

The servers have all been moved to Heliohost's new location. The Heliohost admin's are the only ones with access to the new locked cabinet so this increases our data security even more than it was before when we were using a shared space. This new cabinet is also seven times larger than our old location so it will give us plenty of space to continue growing in the future. Stevie is now doing some preventative maintenance since we were rebooting all the servers anyways. Stevie should be up after that maintenance is done which could be around an hour. Cody is already back online and running great. Johnny should be up soon. As usual you can expect higher than usual load on Johnny for a while following this reboot. We are all really excited about this upgrade, and we'll keep you updated as events unfold. Let us know if you have any questions. Thanks for being a part of the Heliohost community.

Please join us in congratulating our newest promotion, wolstech! This promotion is well deserved on account of the immense amount of work that wolstech has done helping Heliohost users, and taking on the role of training new moderators and admin behind the scenes. In preparation for the new server http://www.helionet.org/index/topic/23117-new-server/ announced recently we have decided to expand the number of staff to assist with the increase of users. As always Heliohost is dedicated to providing the best free hosting, and it's exemplary volunteers like wolstech that makes this possible. If you're interested in becoming an admin too this is a great time to start. Just like wolstech you can start helping your fellow Heliohost users on the forums http://helionet.org/ or on our IRC chat http://www.heliohost.org/home/support/chat We pay close attention to how helpful various members of the Heliohost community are, and if you seem to have what it takes we will offer you a promotion. Let us know if you have any questions, and as always thank you for being a part of the Heliohost community.

Heliohost is in the process of getting a new server, and we would like to let our users know how they can help! This new server will be better, faster, and stronger than all of our current servers, and will allow us to provide free hosting to even more eager Heliohost users. Why do we need a new server? You may have noticed that our main website http://heliohost.org/ our forum http://helionet.org/ and our Johnny accounts have been getting progressively slower and slower. This is a problem! We've outgrown our current array of servers, and by adding a new server we will be able to alleviate the above problems. We expect Johnny accounts to get a lot more stable, and have drastically improved uptime. We expect our homepage, and our forums to load quicker. Best of all, we will be adding a new server that users can create accounts on to help ease the over-crowding on both Stevie and Johnny. How can YOU help? New servers cost a lot of money in up-front cost, monthly bills, and work for our admins. We would love for our users to be able to help out with this process. Most free hosts are just schemes to try to sell you paid services, but here at Heliohost we believe that hosting should be FREE! Not just a crappy free hosting scheme with such restrictive settings that you can't actually run a real website. Heliohost is different. One of the most common questions we get from our users is, "How does Heliohost provide quality hosting for free?" Donations Like most free services Heliohost relies on donations from its users to continue operation. If you can spare any amount even as little as $1 it will help. To make a donation right now you can visit https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=P63828V7WFM54 Ad Revenue A lot of our money comes from ad revenue. If you can't afford to make a donation you can still help out by whitelisting Heliohost in your ad blocker. If you view the ads on our homepage, the forums, and your cpanel interface it all adds up to money that we can use to continue operation and improve our services. In addition to whitelisting and viewing our ads you can also click ads that appeal to you. Clicking ads provides Heliohost with even more money than just viewing the ads. There are even browser addons that will click the ads for you if you want to install something like that to help us out. Social Media As a free service Heliohost would rather spend our money on providing better service to our users than spend our money on advertising to get more new users. This means that we rely on our existing users to spread word of mouth recommendations of Heliohost's services. The easiest way to help advertise Heliohost is by using social media to let all of your friends and followers know about us. You can like us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/HelioHost-133105633434140/ You can follow us on twitter and you can even give us +1 on google plus if you use that https://plus.google.com/116755433050903410191 Write a review Setting up a new website, or moving your existing website to a new hosting service is a lot of work. People want to know how good a host is before they go to all that work so writing up an honest review of our services is a great way to help out. If there's something you love about Heliohost let everyone know. If there's something you think we could improve on let everyone, especially us, know about that too. There are hundreds of host reviewing websites on the internet in every language imaginable so it's beyond the scope of this news post to start listing them all. Just get creative in your google queries. Post about us in a group that you belong to. Let people at your school know about us. If you speak a language other than English we would love for you to write recommendations to use our service in all languages too. Help other users Did you know that Heliohost admins are volunteers? Did you know that any Heliohost user can be promoted to admin simply by being helpful and answering the questions of their fellow users on our forums http://helionet.org/ and our http://www.heliohost.org/home/support/chat IRC channel? With the addition of a new server we will need even more admins to help out with the added numbers of users. Now is a great time to earn yourself that promotion by being helpful. Not only that but the best way to learn about all of the tricks of hosting is by trying to help other users. Ask any of Heliohost's admins and they will all agree that they've learned a ton and gained all sorts of useful experience by being an admin. But wait, there's more! Being a Heliohost admin is a lot of fun too! If you have any comments or suggestions regarding the new server we would love to hear from you. Thanks for being part of the Heliohost community.

Hurricane Electric had an issue with the routing of requests to our IP address at 64.62.211.132, which unfortunately houses our main site http://heliohost.org/ After several hours of tirelessly collaborating with the Hurricane Electric technicians we managed to get the IP address working again. Our support forum at http://helionet.org/ was not affected, nor were any of our user accounts on Stevie or Johnny. The problem wasn't with our servers at all so unfortunately the Heliohost administrators weren't able to fix this issue themselves, but we were able to help troubleshoot the issue and send our findings to the Hurricane Electric technicians on site. Thank you for your patience during this downtime.

All services on the Johnny server are now up and running once again, and the excess load from the maintenance is beginning to subside. Let us know if you're having any problems still. Thank you for your patience, and thanks for being a part of the Heliohost community.