A Plea: Signing Up For A Free Account Is Basically Impossible. Change The Front Page To Reflect That.

[jesse]

I am new to Heliohost. I recently tried to create an account on Tommy, and have went through two separate issues with this. In the most recent, the window for signing up with an account on Tommy was < 2 seconds. In response, admin Krydos suggested I make a donation in order to get hosting.

(That convo took place this forum thread, but discussing this there would have been a little off-topic, so I'm creating this new thread.)

 

....I have considered making a donation. My site will be for a small side hobby/business. Over the course of a year or two, if I make money and if I can successfully run the site on the hardware provided, I was going to basically donate a % of my profit, TBD. Also, you guys do seem to be on top of things as far as service/support which I experienced in the linked topic above, and thanks for that.

 

On the opposite side, I really do feel deceived, and I believe what has happened to me is a deceptive practice, free or not. The front page says:

"Community powered free hosting for everyone"

But in reality, at least at present time, it's:

"Community powered hosting for those who can hit F5/refresh in one second and win the lottery [and that's kind of ridiculous], or just pay a one time fee to get your account."

 

It sounds like >99% of everybody looking at Heliohost for hosting is going to experience what I'm experiencing. None of that is explained or experienced until after signup, except for a hint buried in the FAQ under the question "What is a Daily Signup Limit and why is it stopping me from registering?". I really think something should be done about this. If the reality is that everybody should donate a few bucks to get hosting, then just be straightforward about it. Also, Krydos was basically up-selling me an account, after stating on the front page that you won't try to upsell me to a "paid plan". I realize it's not a "plan", but it is an up-sell.

 

This experience has kind of soured my tongue. If this isn't the group's intent and there is something I can do to help that the admins need, let me know.

[Krydos]

Thanks for the great post. I'm sure there are others who are thinking the same as you.

 

Storytime!

 

When I created my first account in 2009 there was only one server: Stevie. I stayed up until 2am local time three nights in a row to get my account because Stevie signups filled so quickly. The first night I wasn't paying much attention and didn't check until about ten minutes after. The second night I set some alarms and mashed the F5 button and still didn't manage to get an account. The third night was the charm and I managed to get an account. At the time there was no option to donate to get an invite. Your only option was to stay up until the middle of the night. I had used a lot of free hosts, and over the next few days as I began to use my treasured Stevie account I realized that there was something special about Heliohost. It was like night and day between other free hosts and Heliohost. Based on those first impressions, and my interactions with the admins at the time when I had problems lead me to believe in the Heliohost concept. I saw that the admins were fairly overworked for being volunteers, and I started helping out on the forums. Just simple stuff like posting links for people who couldn't find them on their own, etc. After ~100 or so helpful posts the admins started to notice, and after some internal discussion decided to promote me and give me access to some tools so I could be even more helpful.

 

Fast forward a bit, and I've basically gone from just a random user who found Heliohost out of the hundreds of other free hosts, to essentially running the whole thing. When I took over as root admin I inherited a Stevie with an abysmal ~65% uptime, and Johnny was even worse. Through seven or so years of experience with free hosting I've come to realize that you can have uptime or you can have unlimited signups. You can't have both on the same server. If you have unlimited signups the server gets overloaded and then everyone complains about how bad the uptime is. If you have 99.9%+ uptime then people start complaining about not being able to create an account.

 

My solution: Have experimental servers with unlimited signups, and have stable servers with limited signups.

 

Right now we're having some pretty serious hardware issues on our ancient 8 year old machines. That's why we're asking for donations for the first time in the 12 years that Heliohost has provided hosting for free. Stevie had a hard drive fail completely, and Johnny seems to be having some sort of hardware failure too. We need to repair our servers, and buy new hardware. That takes money. Tommy is an amazing server, but without multiple servers we can't have an experimental server with open signups like you want. If we can raise enough funds to make repairs Stevie and Tommy will be our stable servers with great uptime, and Johnny will be our experimental server with unlimited signups.

 

There's a big difference in my opinion between an upsell and a donation. First of all there is nothing special about a donation account versus a free account on Tommy. There is no difference between a free Tommy account, a $1 donation Tommy account or a $100 donation Tommy account. Donations definitely aren't required to have an account on Tommy. We just wanted to express our gratitude for the donations we receive so we think it's fair to give a gift in exchange. A Tommy invitation link is that thank you gift. Anyone who donates any amount gets the same gift.

 

A parallel to consider here is a free public radio or tv station. They broadcast their signal for free for anyone to listen or watch. We provide free hosting to anyone who signs up and uses it. The radio or television station takes money to continue operation. Our free hosting takes money to continue operation. If people don't donate to free public radio or public tv stations they go out of business. If we don't get enough donations we're going to go out of business too. When you make a donation to a public radio or tv station they may give you a thank you gift like a coffee mug or a shirt. When you make a donation to Heliohost we give you the gift of creating your account a little easier.

 

If you can't make a donation, that's fine. Enjoy the free service, and hope that enough other people make enough donations to keep your service free. If you can make a donation please know how much we appreciate it, and also know how much all of the people who can't make donations appreciate it. Some of our users are under 18 and can't use paypal. Some of our users live in Iran and can't transfer money to us. We at Heliohost believe in free hosting for everyone. Everyone should be able to have their own website.

[gecemor]

I understand you, you are right. Everyone would do the same. But....We are waiting for days. And We constantly change the server. Tired...

Please give at least one chance for followers. We deserve it

Also yesterday's recors (2.5 hours):

http://heliohost.grd.net.pl/monitor/archive/?2017-01-09

 

Today's records (0 hours or 0 minute, maybe 0 second ):

http://heliohost.grd.net.pl/monitor/archive/?2017-01-10

 

 

How can we catch it like this?

[wolstech]

Today's records (0 hours or 0 minute, maybe 0 second ):

http://heliohost.grd.net.pl/monitor/archive/?2017-01-10

 

 

How can we catch it like this?

I think this one's a new record...at least in the 6 years I've been here. I can't recall a day where signups actually opened, but didn't record on the monitor as being open for a minute or two. That monitor has a pretty good resolution, so being fast enough to not get caught by it is quite impressive.

 

 

And We constantly change the server. Tired...

We didn't expect Johnny to fail. Nobody did. It's just as bad for the admins as it is for the users. We're spending our time helping those users move to Tommy now, after we just did it to move them to Johnny. Many of those users were already upset at losing the Stevie account, let alone a Johnny one too.

 

It's also worth noting that it'll likely get a little easier to sign up as the days go by. The number of signups we allow per day on a new server typically increases with time. We still have bugs to work out with the signup process (which we recently redesigned with our new website). We don't know how Tommy will handle lots of users. As a result, we don't want them piling on all at once, then all complaining when their accounts didn't create right / the server crashed / etc. Once we see days where small numbers of new accounts go smoothly, we increase it. Similarly, as Johnny users finally get Tommy accounts, there's less of an initial rush, so demand drops. As a result, the registrations stay open longer.

 

 

 

How can we catch it like this?

Waiting a few days for the initial rush to die down first will probably help.

 

It took me multiple tries to get a Stevie account back in 2011...at 3AM local no less! I was an overworked college student then...the last thing I wanted to do was stay up to 3AM for a hosting account with what little sleep I was getting, especially knowing there was no guarantee I'd be successful. I finally got one after several tries though, and have no regrets. Stevie gave me ~5 years of good service, and I expect Tommy to do the same.

[gecemor]

@wolstech i understand you, thank you for your reply so insomnia again tonight. And, I must be as fast as Neo

[jesse]

Thanks for the great post. I'm sure there are others who are thinking the same as you.

 

Storytime!

 

When I created my first account in 2009 there was only one server: Stevie. I stayed up until 2am local time three nights in a row to get my account because Stevie signups filled so quickly. The first night I wasn't paying much attention and didn't check until about ten minutes after. The second night I set some alarms and mashed the F5 button and still didn't manage to get an account. The third night was the charm and I managed to get an account. At the time there was no option to donate to get an invite. Your only option was to stay up until the middle of the night. I had used a lot of free hosts, and over the next few days as I began to use my treasured Stevie account I realized that there was something special about Heliohost. It was like night and day between other free hosts and Heliohost. Based on those first impressions, and my interactions with the admins at the time when I had problems lead me to believe in the Heliohost concept. I saw that the admins were fairly overworked for being volunteers, and I started helping out on the forums. Just simple stuff like posting links for people who couldn't find them on their own, etc. After ~100 or so helpful posts the admins started to notice, and after some internal discussion decided to promote me and give me access to some tools so I could be even more helpful.

 

Fast forward a bit, and I've basically gone from just a random user who found Heliohost out of the hundreds of other free hosts, to essentially running the whole thing.

 

 

 

There's a big difference in my opinion between an upsell and a donation. First of all there is nothing special about a donation account versus a free account on Tommy. There is no difference between a free Tommy account, a $1 donation Tommy account or a $100 donation Tommy account. Donations definitely aren't required to have an account on Tommy. We just wanted to express our gratitude for the donations we receive so we think it's fair to give a gift in exchange. A Tommy invitation link is that thank you gift. Anyone who donates any amount gets the same gift.

 

A parallel to consider here is a free public radio or tv station. They broadcast their signal for free for anyone to listen or watch. We provide free hosting to anyone who signs up and uses it. The radio or television station takes money to continue operation. Our free hosting takes money to continue operation. If people don't donate to free public radio or public tv stations they go out of business. If we don't get enough donations we're going to go out of business too. When you make a donation to a public radio or tv station they may give you a thank you gift like a coffee mug or a shirt. When you make a donation to Heliohost we give you the gift of creating your account a little easier.

 

If you can't make a donation, that's fine. Enjoy the free service, and hope that enough other people make enough donations to keep your service free. If you can make a donation please know how much we appreciate it, and also know how much all of the people who can't make donations appreciate it. Some of our users are under 18 and can't use paypal. Some of our users live in Iran and can't transfer money to us. We at Heliohost believe in free hosting for everyone. Everyone should be able to have their own website.

 

<snip>

 

Some of our users are under 18 and can't use paypal. Some of our users live in Iran and can't transfer money to us. We at Heliohost believe in free hosting for everyone. Everyone should be able to have their own website.

 

@Krydos @Krydos That is quite a story. I fully understand and share your "server philosophy" and willingness to help out. I started hosting my own apache server over dialup when I was in 3rd grade, without any external help and no money for a proper host. (And even if I was rich or had access to a credit card, I only hosted javascript games and things I thought were "cool" lol. It doesn't take many resources to start to learn.) I myself would help out in the forums, if I had time. But in ~4 weeks, I will most likely be leaving for the remote wilderness for roughly a year with no PC...

 

 

When I took over as root admin I inherited a Stevie with an abysmal ~65% uptime, and Johnny was even worse. Through seven or so years of experience with free hosting I've come to realize that you can have uptime or you can have unlimited signups. You can't have both on the same server. If you have unlimited signups the server gets overloaded and then everyone complains about how bad the uptime is. If you have 99.9%+ uptime then people start complaining about not being able to create an account.

 

My solution: Have experimental servers with unlimited signups, and have stable servers with limited signups.

 

Right now we're having some pretty serious hardware issues on our ancient 8 year old machines. That's why we're asking for donations for the first time in the 12 years that Heliohost has provided hosting for free. Stevie had a hard drive fail completely, and Johnny seems to be having some sort of hardware failure too. We need to repair our servers, and buy new hardware. That takes money. Tommy is an amazing server, but without multiple servers we can't have an experimental server with open signups like you want. If we can raise enough funds to make repairs Stevie and Tommy will be our stable servers with great uptime, and Johnny will be our experimental server with unlimited signups.

 

So, it sounds like reliability is a major problem. Not much you can do as far as hardware beside closely monitoring logs, and having funds on hand for parts when the time comes. I have some stuff on hand that I have little use for, but it's probably all older than your servers. But I'm wondering whether it's primarily:

• A hardware reliability problem
• A software reliability problem
• Not really either, but because of an unrealistic amount of accounts sharing the same server, putting the server in a precarious state. I wouldn't have enough experience to compare Heliohost to another similar hosting service in order to say how many of these kinds of accounts is too many. I have never had to allocate resources for so many customers.

There's a big difference in my opinion between an upsell and a donation. First of all there is nothing special about a donation account versus a free account on Tommy. There is no difference between a free Tommy account, a $1 donation Tommy account or a $100 donation Tommy account. Donations definitely aren't required to have an account on Tommy. We just wanted to express our gratitude for the donations we receive so we think it's fair to give a gift in exchange. A Tommy invitation link is that thank you gift. Anyone who donates any amount gets the same gift.

 

A parallel to consider here is a free public radio or tv station. They broadcast their signal for free for anyone to listen or watch. We provide free hosting to anyone who signs up and uses it. The radio or television station takes money to continue operation. Our free hosting takes money to continue operation. If people don't donate to free public radio or public tv stations they go out of business. If we don't get enough donations we're going to go out of business too. When you make a donation to a public radio or tv station they may give you a thank you gift like a coffee mug or a shirt. When you make a donation to Heliohost we give you the gift of creating your account a little easier.

I like the public TV station analogy. The difference I'm seeing is that, with a public TV station, everyone gets (partial or full) access to the service. With Heliohost, realistically, our only choice is to make a donation to get any access to any hosting service. When signing up, the other 2 server choices are showing up as full/unavailable. I understand a non-profit has to spend money and therefore has to get money in some way, but for >99.99% of new users looking at Heliohost, there is nothing being offered without a payment besides a lottery with 1 in >1000 probability, while everyone looking on the front page of the site is being told something opposite. I also don't think there's such a thing as a "required donation" for a non-profit in order to get service (excluding customer service, obviously). It's just a business. That is my understanding; however, I'm not a legal expert on such things.

 

If you can't make a donation, that's fine. Enjoy the free service, and hope that enough other people make enough donations to keep your service free. If you can make a donation please know how much we appreciate it, and also know how much all of the people who can't make donations appreciate it.

 

Ok, I'll go ahead and make a small donation and get back to you guys if I have any problems. I do appreciate the effort you took in explaining the history and your viewpoint.

[Krydos]

Just last week we had 3-4 hours a day of open signups available. It's just really bad timing right now. Give us some time to get someone to California to work on Stevie and Charlie onsite and we'll be in much better shape. Thanks everyone for being understanding.

[jesse]

Ironically, my remote wilderness trip is in California, but I don't suppose you'd want a total stranger working on your servers