New Partnership with Plesk

[HelioHost]

Less than 24 hours later we have already managed to negotiate and sign a contract with Plesk that is even better than the one we had with cPanel. It's going to be a lot of work to rebuild everything with Plesk, but in the long run this will be a good thing to get rid of cPanel.

Plesk can run on Windows and Linux so we will be able to offer a unified system that includes all of our existing Linux servers as well as our Windows server Lily. Since Lily will have a real control panel it will make it much easier to create an account on her and give easy access to many more people to develop their websites for free using Microsoft's ASP.NET.

Plesk is excited to be given the opportunity to supply the control panel that we use to provide much needed assistance to thousands of students, the underprivileged, and small businesses around the world that cannot afford to pay for hosting. Part of the contract includes our permission for Plesk to feature our logo, our mission, and our success stories on their website.

Honestly, we couldn't have even hoped for something more perfect than this.

It's going to take some time to get everything switched over though. Now that we have a new contract for a control panel our next highest priority will be backing up everyone's account. Then we will wipe Tommy and rebuild him using Plesk, and begin restoring accounts. After that will be Ricky, and Johnny. In the meantime you might consider a VPS to keep your site online using the same domain that you have now. You can find the VPS signup page at https://www.heliohost.org/vps/

Let us know if you have any questions or need help with anything during this painful transition. Thanks for being a member of the HelioHost community.

[Flaze]

This is perfect. I didn't expect Plesk to be our go-to but I'm glad it is.

Transitioning is still going to be time consuming, but it's for a good cause. We'll finally have a web interface for our Windows server Lily as an extra.

I'll patiently wait.

[mabass]

That's fantastic news. Are you set financially? I'd happily contribute to a donation drive. If only to see it go beyond 17.000$ as final salute to cpanel.

[Seekier]

This is a great news,  thanks to Heliohost team for not giving up

[OnEnemy]

Super excited. Although I'm sad to see cpanel go, this brings new opportunities. I really want to see how plesk works (I've never used it) and I'm sure this will be a new experience for everyone.

Amazing, I can't wait!

[trenten]

Glad to see the end is not near. I was just in the middle of updating pages for testing when the site quit loading and noticed cPanel wasn't logging in.

 

[mabass]

1 hour ago, HelioHost said:

It's going to take some time to get everything switched over though. Now that we have a new contract for a control panel our next highest priority will be backing up everyone's account. Then we will wipe Tommy and rebuild him using Plesk, and begin restoring accounts. After that will be Ricky, and Johnny. In the meantime you might consider a VPS to keep your site online using the same domain that you have now. You can find the VPS signup page at https://www.heliohost.org/vps/

How can I sign up for a VPS with a non-american address? Ordering with paypal or credit card fails otherwise.

[daskunk]

That is wonderful news regarding the recent agreement with Plesk. I completely understand the need to take down Tommy and rebuild it. For my situation I have to decide whether to simply wait it out or to set up a temporary solution (such as the VPS). To help with that decision, could you offer a "ballpark" estimate of how long you anticipate Tommy being out of service and when it will begin?  I would also be happy to make a donation to help defray the costs.

[michelc]

As time is critical to migrate to Plesk, I offer my "sysadmin" time if needed let me know if I can be of any  help . And for the community member who can have their website "static" I can offer them a temporary "hostless" solution the time Tommy is rebuild as long as the DNS records of their site can still be updated ?

 

[robertzo]

Love it, I actually prefer Plesk over cPanel because Plesk has a better non cluttered user interface.

[robertzo]

But still I have a question? Why Plesk and not something like Directadmin or Cyberpanel (a free open source panel)?

[balloons]

3 hours ago, mabass said:

How can I sign up for a VPS with a non-american address? Ordering with paypal or credit card fails otherwise.

I was Japanese and experienced it yesterday.

Check the specs and their prices on the VPS page.
Then send this price on the regular donation page.

https://www.heliohost.org/donate/

Then post your VPS order on this HelioNet forum. My post (using Facebook Pay)

 

[Krydos]

4 hours ago, mabass said:

How can I sign up for a VPS with a non-american address? Ordering with paypal or credit card fails otherwise.

Sorry about that. The VPS signup page is really new, and only 2 people have used it so far. I added NO_SHIPPING to the code which should fix that issue. Let me know if you're still having issues. Thanks for letting me know about it.

57 minutes ago, balloons said:

My post (using Facebook Pay)

Thanks for testing our Facebook donations. No one has ever donated via Facebook before so I'm not sure how the fees will compare to Paypal. However, for VPS it would be best to use the actual VPS page because it sets up a subscription that autobills on it's own. With a Facebook donation it doesn't automatically update the expiration date in the database, and I'll have to manually track it.

[Krydos]

5 hours ago, flazepe said:

This is perfect. I didn't expect Plesk to be our go-to but I'm glad it is.

 

2 hours ago, robertzo said:

Why Plesk and not something like Directadmin or Cyberpanel (a free open source panel)?

I've actually been looking at Plesk for years ever since we set up Lily, but obviously the control panel is the foundation of an entire web hosting company so switching is a massive undertaking. There are very few control panels that run on Linux and Windows. Some run on just Windows, and most run on just Linux, but not both. Plesk will allow us to have both Linux servers and a Windows server and it will tie everything together. I would love to go with free and open source, but as far as I know only a few open source projects have experimental support for Windows hosting so far.

As soon as I contacted Plesk asking them if they could help us, they literally dropped everything they were doing to get us a contract to sign before I changed my mind and looked elsewhere. Plesk, unlike cPanel, realizes that a verified and experienced non-profit with the purpose of providing free hosting is a gold mine for public relations. It's actually part of the contract that I signed that we have to let them put our logo and story on their website. This will make them look really good, and they know it.

Plus as a free host we attract a lot of people who are new to hosting, and have zero experience with any control panel. Over the years we have gotten literally hundreds of thousands of people hooked on cPanel. When they move on to paid hosting they make sure that cPanel is available before they signup because that is what they know and love from using it here. Now we can get all those people started on Plesk instead.

  

On 7/14/2021 at 6:44 PM, dalrae said:

Why do you think this happened?

100% without a doubt cPanel thought that we couldn't survive without them, and we would just give up and hand over the $1442 per month to keep their licenses. Absolute pure greed. If the reason was anything other than money they wouldn't have just said "you can buy full licenses".

[franznic]

This is literally a life saver for Heliohost and the community. We're all looking forward in this exciting new life without cPanel and the new interface of Plesk. Now this I confirm, that this is now the new HelioHost. ❤️