https://helionet.org/index/rss/1-news.xml/HelioHost NewsenPHP 8.5 is now available on all of our hosting plans, including the free Johnny plan. We've also taken the opportunity to upgrade Plesk to the latest version and do a thorough upgrade of all system packages. The performance for the Johnny server has been a little slow for the last few days due to high load, but things are going back to normal now. There may have been a few errors messages as various services restarted, but now that the maintenance is over let us know if any of the error messages persist. We try to avoid doing upgrades too often, because they can cause downtime and slow performance, but it's critical to keep everything up to date to avoid vulnerabilities.Thu, 09 Apr 2026 22:08:18 +0000Johnny has been powered back on, and everything seems to be working. Let us know if you notice any issues.Mon, 23 Mar 2026 19:07:52 +0000We are currently doing maintenance in our datacenter, and we are going to be powering off Johnny, and a few VPS for a short period. We'll make another news post once everything is back online.Mon, 23 Mar 2026 18:13:57 +0000We're updating our Terms of Service. Our Terms explain what you can expect from us when using our services, and what we expect from you as a user of our services. You can find the updated Terms at the following URL: https://heliohost.org/terms Our policy is to make a news post each time we make changes to the Terms of Service to give you plenty of time to review the changes and opt out of the changes if you wish to. What is changing: * California recently passed legislation making casino or gambling websites that use real money or cryptocurrency illegal. Since our servers are located in that state, we are required to comply with the new laws. * The Tommy and Johnny servers use Plesk non-profit licenses, so commercial websites are not allowed on those plans. If your business is just starting out, you can set up your website on the free hosting, but we will periodically review your account. If we decide that your business no longer counts as a micro-business, we will require you to move to Morty or a VPS. * For people who choose to run paid software, our policy has always been to ask for proof of purchase to make sure the paid software is legally licensed. We're adding this policy to our Terms of Service, so users are aware prior to installation that providing proof will be required. * It really should be common sense not to attack your own website and attack your own host, but not everyone has common sense unfortunately, so we're adding it to our Terms of Service that you can't stress test your own website. What this means for you: Our Terms have been updated to reflect these changes and go into effect on March 31st, 2026. If you agree to these Terms, no further action is needed, and you can continue using our services as you always have. By continuing to use our websites or the services you receive after that date, you agree to the updated Terms We hope that you'll agree to our Terms and continue to use HelioHost. If you don't want to accept the changes, you can choose to leave HelioHost by deleting your account and no longer accessing or using our services. We would be sad to see you go though.Mon, 16 Mar 2026 15:38:07 +0000It looks like the upgrades from yesterday broke some of the email functionality of the Tommy server. Webmail wasn't working and receiving emails was failing as well. However, sending emails continued working. Webmail and incoming mails should be fixed now. Any emails that were sent to domains on Tommy overnight should work now because the remote mail servers should continue retrying now that the server is correctly accepting mail again. So no emails should be lost, but rather just delayed a bit. Thanks to the users who reported these issues. Let us know if you're noticing any other issues on the Tommy server after the upgrades.Sat, 28 Feb 2026 20:05:07 +0000PHP 8.5 is now available on both our Tommy and Morty plans. We will be installing PHP 8.5 on the free Johnny server in a few weeks as well. We've also taken the opportunity to upgrade Plesk to the latest version and do a thorough upgrade of all system packages. The performance for the Tommy server has been a little slow for the last few hours due to high load, but things are going back to normal now. There may have been a few errors messages as various services restarted, but now that the maintenance is over let us know if any of the error messages persist. We try to avoid doing upgrades too often, because they can cause downtime and slow performance, but it's critical to keep everything up to date to avoid vulnerabilities.Sat, 28 Feb 2026 03:51:51 +0000Since our Johnny server is scheduled to be upgraded to faster hardware soon, so we've decided to increase the number of free accounts that we allow new users to create each day. After increasing the limits a few days ago we've seen free signups stay open for 10 minutes, 20 minutes, and even as much as 48 minutes. Keep in mind we have no direct control over how long free signups are open. We just monitor the uptime, speed, and load of the Johnny server. Then we take into consideration how many accounts get abandoned and go inactive each day. Finally we use all of that data to give away as many free accounts as we can, while still keeping the Johnny server "usable". Our goal is 97% uptime, and a load level of less than 20, which we consider good enough for a free service. If you need better uptime, or a faster loading website we have several upgrade options available. At times we've seen 20 accounts get reserved in less than a second, so even after raising the limit, it's still possible for signups to fill quickly. It really just depends on how many people are trying to signup each day. We generally don't disclose the exact number of signups available each day, because it can vary from day to day, but since the recent increase has caused free signups to stay open for nearly an hour it may be worth mentioning. If you're not very quick at clicking, this might be a good opportunity to get a free account, but if the uptime and speed of Johnny start dropping we may need to decrease the signups again. Our goal is to have free signups stay open as long as possible each day, but our free service is very popular so it tends to fill quickly. Let us know if you have any questions, or comments.Thu, 12 Feb 2026 03:44:02 +0000We're increasing the domain limit on the Morty server from 10 to 15! After a year of running our newest plan, Morty, we are still seeing great performance. This plan has nearly perfect uptime, great speeds, and Apache still restarts quite quickly. Therefore we are increasing the domain limit on Morty. If you need more than 15 domains you're welcome to create multiple Morty accounts, or switch to one of our VPS plans which allow unlimited domains. On the other hand, our free Johnny plan is still quite overcrowded and slow. In order to help speed up the server we're reducing the domain limit from 10 to 5. Our mission as a non-profit is to provide free hosting to as many people in need as we can. Our mission is NOT to provide free hosting to just a few people who each have a ridiculous number of domains. We think it best supports our mission to set a reasonable limit to make sure a few entitled people don't hog all of our free resources. If you need more than 5 domains you can make a one-time donation of only $2 to move to Tommy and have 10 domains available, or upgrade to Morty or a VPS. There are a few Johnny users who currently have more than 5 domains, and they will be allowed to keep their current domains for now, but if they want to add or change any of their domains, they will be required to comply with our new limit or upgrade to a plan that supports more domains. Let us know if you have any questions about the updating domain limits.Wed, 28 Jan 2026 20:16:06 +0000HelioHost is happy to announce that we now support PHP 8.5 on the Morty plan. The Tommy plan will be upgraded to have PHP 8.5 soon, and after that Johnny will have it installed too.Wed, 31 Dec 2025 04:14:37 +0000This morning the city in California where our datacenter is located had a power outage. It took the city a few hours to restore the power, but once the power was back on all of our servers booted up. Everything should be online and fully functional now, but if you notice any issues please let us know.Tue, 23 Dec 2025 23:13:53 +0000