badrihippo

If you want to gamble on Tommy being back in a month, perhaps you could sign up for a one-month trial at Linode or some similar service? They provide pretty decent VPSes.

If it's a long-term open source project, you could also apply for free hosting at Fosshost. I'm not sure how strict they are, but it might be worth a shot. I don't think they're interested in short-term operations though, and there's a submission process you have to go through.

I've also used Byethost in the past; they have a cPanel-based setup although it seemed slightly shady and they try to push you to upgrade to Hostinger, whom I think are their partners.

Speaking of which, if you're willing to spend a couple of dollars just for the month, Hostinger has mildly restricted plans starting at $1.39/mo.

Nothing perfect, but they might be able to keep you running till Tommy's back. Good luck!

Yup, got it. The scalability factor makes sense; I didn't think of that!

10 hours ago, Unknown025 said:

If you're looking to migrate to a VPS, Krydos might be able to help with that.

No worries about that: I have a (HelioHost) VPS already; just hadn't bothered to move the last few stuff from Tommy. I guess the time for that has come 😅

Wow, thanks @balloons for the detailed response and for taking the time to piece everything together! Good to know about the timeline; I'm on Tommy so I'll start moving right away then 😛

If you're a bit more adventurous, you could also try YunoHost: you need to copy-paste a few shell commands to set it up (and it needs a Debian VPS) but once that's done you get a dashboard to set up domains, email, SSL, etc., as well as the facility to install various "apps".

Might not be for you if you're planning to switch back to Tommy eventually though.

Hey there,

Just got you email about cPanel unilaterally revoking licenses 🙁 Very evil of them, and thanks a lot for the heads-up as well as working so hard to keep this service going!

A few questions about the switchover process. Others are welcome to add in theirs too—I see queries all over the place right now and it'd save time for everyone if we had everything in one thread (the more generic ones, at least) 🙂

• You say our websites will be down, but as of now mine (a set of static files as well as a MySQL remote connection) are still working. Does that mean it'll stay, or is it going to go down in a bit?
• If the latter, would there be a grace period before you start work? I'd definitely find it helpful if I had, say, a couple days to switch over to my VPS and get things running there. (Of course that also means people who don't have a backup plan wait that much longer for their setup to be fixed, so if you need to blackout now, that's cool, I understand).
• A more long term question (which you've probably already thought about): are there any open-source cPanel/Plesk alternatives which would prevent HelioHost from being caught in the cold again?

Also, to answer some of the panicked enquiries elsewhere on the forum, I'm pretty sure HelioHost will remain free as soon as the Plesk switchover has been sorted out. That's kind of the point of their existence 😉

This is not a specific issue but a general question. Is there a way to manually reboot my HelioHost VPS without contacting customer support?

I know I can just type reboot in the console to have it restart, but I'm talking about cases where the command line is inaccessible, for example because of high load or an out-of-control process (which happened to me recently). It would be nice if there was some way to expose the vmware commands for a hard power-on/power-off—not that I would use it much, but it'd be a safety net I'd know was there if something went wrong.

Thanks! The runaway process must have taken over again when I checked, because I wasn't able to log in or even ping, but it's stabilised now and I have some inkling as to what the problem was. (My YunoHost had many dyndns processes running; I'm not sure why but I removed the DynDNS domain name since I don't use it anyway).

Do you think there's a way you could provide "hard reset VPS" buttons to users? Just for poweroff and (re)boot. I think it would make things easier, because (a) I won't have to worry about powering off the system in such a way that I can't turn it on again and (b\) if some memory situations happens I can reboot myself instead of having to ask each time. I'm not sure how that would work in your setup though, but maybe you could have an email-based API or something that pushes the vmware buttons internally?

By the way, if you need to restart the VPS or anything feel free to do so; everything's down anyway so it's not going to make a difference  (just giving you the permission in advance!)

Hi,

My VPS has slowed to a crawl for the past 8 hours: it started taking time to respond, and now all SSH and HTTP connection attempts are timing out: the only way I know my server is still alive is through a ping. I've seen this happen for short stretches before, but this is the first time it's been down for so long.

Could someone check if this is a problem specific to my server or an issue across all VPSes? The only unusual thing I did today was to try upgrading wallabag (which is a PHP app) on YunoHost; the upgrade failed early because of some connection issues so I think the problem was already there before.

VPS domains: hippo2.heliohost.org and members.snipettemag.com

Thanks in advance!

Yayy! Thank you

Hi there,

I'm using YunoHost on a VPS to receive email, but it seems I need an rDNS set up to avoid spam filters. Could you set one up pointing to the following domain?

IP: 64.71.156.101

Hostname: members.snipettemag.com

I think that's it but let me know if you need more details. Thanks in advance!

So I took advantage of the downtime to set up email on the VPS right away. All set up now. Thanks again!

Oh well...another few hours doesn't matter I guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Okay, that makes sense! I had actually forgotten about the email limit.

My account still seems to be blocked, so could you unblock it, please? I'll move my email setup over as soon as that's done. (I've been procrastinating on that for a while, so I guess this is a wake-up call )

We sent out a bunch of emails today relating to a webinar we're currently running (to people who'd already registered). I'm not sure if that's the reason?

Hi,

My account got suspended about 45 minutes ago. I'm not sure why, because I had reasonable free space and there wasn't inordinate load. Could you give me some more info on what happened?

By the way, I also have a VPS, so I'm not sure if there's a connection there. If it's a load problem I could move stuff over to the VPS I guess (I haven't had time to move things over yet, so doing it slowly).

Thanks,
Hippo

Hi there,

This is in response to the "Would you be interested in a new server?" you sent out a few weeks ago. I chose "no" because I've just migrated over to a VPS, but I want to say, this idea made me very excited!

My two-years-ago self would have been delighted at the opportunity to run things like Ghost and Grav without worrying about load, and with much less maintenance and cost than a VPS! To be honest, most of my reluctance to run heavy scripts was not for fear of being suspended, but just that fact that I'd be adding so much load to the server without giving anything back for it—so this micro-payment style model would help me carry on without feeling so guilty. Not useful for me now because of the VPS, but it's certainly an awesome feature which I think some of my friends would be interested in if they get to that stage.

While I'm here, let me sign off with: thanks for all the thought and effort you put into your services—we're all lucky to have a webhost like yours!

I've never tried HTTP-based git on HelioHost, but even before they had the option, I was using git-ftp to manage files. This won't create a full-fledged git repo, but it uses its own system to simulate a git push: if files are changed on your repo, it will change exactly those files on the destination FTP server as well.

If you're only using git to deploy changes, this might be the right thing for you, but note that you will have to always use the same computer to push, and ideally have the source code itself hosted elsewhere if you want to do regular git stuff as well.

Great, thanks a lot! Now that you mention it, I did notice /usr/sbin/ being off the path at some earlier point but forgot about it when this new problem came up. That was a bit silly of me. I'll keep it in mind next time.

Oh okay, that makes sense. No worries, but could you perhaps install vmware tools now, once you're done, to prevent it from happening again? I don't mind a a few days' wait.

I've sent you the new user and root passwords by email.

Hi all...my VPS filesystem has suddenly become readonly

[154995.476735] EXT4-fs error (device sda1): ext4_journal_check_start:61: Detected aborted journal
[154995.478036] EXT4-fs (sda1): Remounting filesystem read-only

My server is hippo2.heliohost.org, running Debian 10. (I don't have any irreplaceable data left, so a full reinstall is also an option, although not ideal).

Hey admins,

Just a heads-up that the FAQ link in this forum's description (Customer Service) is broken. It points to the old

https://wiki.helionet.org/Heliohost_FAQ

I think it's meant to point to this new link?

https://wiki.helionet.org/faq

Sounds good. Thanks a lot! And yes, please use hippo2.heliohost.org for the VPS for now. I have other domains which I'll point later, but it'll be good to have a base domain to start with.

I'm mainly using Python on the server (Flask and Django). I'll install those and mysql. I'm planning to set up YunoHost to manage a few additional apps—I think that uses nginx? Maybe I'll just reconfigure my apps for that; there's nothing major anyway.

I run Linux (earlier Ubuntu, now Manjaro) on my desktop so I'm somewhat experienced in setting up software, although not a server specifically. I'll let you know if I run into problems. Thanks again

Hi,

I tried ordering a VPS via your form, but I was having some trouble with activating PayPal subscriptions, so decided to send a direct payment instead. I'd like the lowest-end VPS, namely:

• 1GB memory
• 2CPUs
• 50GB storage
• OS: Debian 10

I have sent in $9, which I think will cover 2 months? If this works out, I'll try a larger payment, maybe for 1 year.

• Transaction ID: 88E56858JW8967519

I sent a bit extra since I wasn't sure if all of it would reach you. If there's extra, I guess you could use that as donation

Before you create the VPS, I have one question: I already have an existing setup on Tommy. Would I have to close that down and set it up again on the VPS? Is there a way to move it across? Or is it fine to keep both operational for a while?

Thanks in advance!

Alright, here you go https://krydos.heliohost.org/ghost/ghost_3.13.4.tar.gz I tested installing it on my Tommy account and everything seems to work. https://krydos.heliohost.org/ghost/

Ooh, thanks a lot! I'm going to use this too, once I get the time to set it up :D

 

To upgrade ghost to the new version using a new zip file like that I believe you would need to export all your data, install ghost again from scratch, and the import all your data.

That means you'll have to upload all post images manually after importing your data

 

• Install Ghost locally, with the same database parameters as the server-side one (this has been tested to work; I've set up a local Ghost installation to use the same Tommy database that my Heroku installation uses)
• Upgrade Ghost locally using the command-line process: this is also supposed to migrate the database so it works with the new version
• Install the new Ghost on the server and make it connect to the same database