jje Posted April 26, 2011 Posted April 26, 2011 Dear users, As some of you are probably aware, we recently conducted a survey open to the general public which would allow us to get an idea of how we can prove our service at HelioHost. We are pleased to announce that we have had over 35 people (and counting!) fill in the survey and we have had many opinions and suggestions to improve the service. In this news topic, I am going to post the responses to the survey and what the administrators think we can do or cannot do. If you have mentioned something that isn't listed below, then it is under discussion and we will post it later, probably in this news topic. Please continue to take part in the survey, and I will update this news topic as soon as I can. This news topic was last updated on 27th April 2011 1. How satisfied are our users with our service? Below are the results out of 5.00. The average of all the questions was collected and has been posted below. Our weakest points are highlighted in question 5 below. Uptime: 3.19 Control Panel: 4.30 Speed of signup: 3.62 Ease of use: 4.38 Overall rating: 4.14 2. How satisfied are our users with our support? Below are the results out of 5.00. The average of all the questions was collected and has been posted below. Our weakest points are highlighted in question 6 below. Speed of reply: 4.38 Efficiency: 4.30 Knowledge: 4.24 Kindness: 4.42 Support FAQ/CAQ: 3.97 Number of admins: 4.19 3. What languages do our users work with? HTML: 89.2% PHP: 81.1% MySQL: 64.9% PostgreSQL: 5.4% Java/JSP: 13.5% ASP.NET: 10.8% Ruby on Rails: 5.4% Python: 10.8% Perl: 16.2% CGI: 8.1% 4. Do you use Softaculous for any software? If so, what type of software do you use (Most popular) 1st. Blog 2nd. CMS 3rd. Forum 4th. Guest book 5th. Wiki 5th. Calendar 5th. Project Management 5th. Customer Support 5th. Educational 5th. Video 5th. JS library 5. How can we improve our service? Could you offer SSH access to your users? We could try offering SSH access to people on Johnny, as it is advertised as the most unstable server compared to Stevie. However, first, we will need to carry out a few security audits to ensure maximum security to the server. We once carried out some security audits as discovered here but never finished them. We may try this in the future. Could signups be made faster in any way? There isn't really much we can do here. It might be possible to increase the bihourly limit, if this would help in any way. Is it possible to improve uptime on Stevie? Since the launch of Johnny, there has been a massive improvement to Stevie. Previously, Stevie's Server Load was around 80.00 most of the time, he was VERY slow, and there were 22,000 accounts putting pressure on him all the time. Plus, he always crashed constantly. Now, he rarely crashes, his server load is below 10.00 most of the time, he only has 16,000 accounts (which is a massive improvement) plus he is really fast. Could we have more space than 250MB? We are unsure why you would need more than 250MB to host your sites when we are a website hosting company, and we are not a file storage site. Also, just adding 20MB to every account would be catastrophic, and we don't have the room on the server: 20 * 15000 = 300000mb more of space. 300000 / 1000 = 300GB more of space. 300 / 1000 = .3 TB's of space. Could we balancing the server load by forcing less active accounts to move to Johnny? Although this is a nice idea, it would actually make the server load higher than it already is as it would require alot of server resources to move an account. Could the FTP service be made faster? The server load has a large affect on FTP, and there is not much we can do about it. cPanel really limits us here. You may want to consider using alternative protocols for file transfer instead of FTP, as other protocols like Web Disk (WebDav) can be much more reliable. You may also want to consider using Ajaxplorer as an online file manager, not to mention cPanel's own online File Manager. Could you host the web.py webpy.org framework? We can easily install this if somebody requests it in Customer Service. If anybody wishes to use this or something similar, please create a new topic in the Customer Service forum and we'll install it for you. Could we have the ability to get access to raw log files? cPanel gives you access to Apache's error_log, but it only greps through for your username. As a result, extended stack traces are not displayed. We can't really modify cPanel's source code, and giving users access to error_log might invade other users' privacy. 6. How can we improve our support? Could you stop relying on the root administrator (djbob) so much? I think we've actually done a lot to be less reliable than me over the last year or two. Two years ago there wasn't even a moderator control panel, let alone other admins with SSH access. The FAQ/CAQ could be laid out more familiarly and be more inclusive - perhaps a wiki could be useful? We recently introduced our HelioHost Wiki which should solve this issue. Put news on frontpage (eg. from Twitter) We already post updates from the 'News' section of the forums on the HelioHost.org homepage. I presume that this covers this topic, or is there something more we can do? Faster response We are unsure of how we can solve this issue, but we will try our best to respond to questions as quickly as we can. If anyone has any further ideas please let us know. Be more polite We will try our best to be as kind as we can. More administrators Unfortunately there isn't much we can do in this area. Becoming an administrator is volunteer work, and we can't force people to volenteer. Also, people need to prove that they have what it takes to become an administrator, such as helping a variety of people and following the guidelines. StackExchange site We are just waiting for people to commit. When enough people commit to our StackExchange project, then we may take the opportunity to setup a StackExchange site.
jje Posted April 27, 2011 Author Posted April 27, 2011 Please continue to take part in the survey, as we still wish to know how we can improve our service further. I will update the thread above with any responses to the survey. If you have any questions, please feel free to PM me or post in this topic.
cl58 Posted April 27, 2011 Posted April 27, 2011 I think that SSH/Shell access for users would be excellent. Other free webhosts offer it and HelioHost on top of everything else that it offers better than other hosts would be much better if it was to be added. I do understand the server requirements and security concerns, but SSH can be very useful to many users.
Ashoat Posted April 28, 2011 Posted April 28, 2011 Out of curiosity, who else offers free SSH access?
jje Posted April 28, 2011 Author Posted April 28, 2011 The only host that comes to mind is AlwaysData.com. Except it only gives you 10MB, so I couldn't even install OSQA on it!
Guest Geoff Posted April 29, 2011 Posted April 29, 2011 devio.us offers free shell, but you don't have your own subdomain, and it's shell only; no file manager/cpanel. sdf.org also offers free shell, but you have to pay $10 (one-time fee) for a website. It's not like other people are offering it, so we need to keep up. However, offering shell to users would really set us apart, even from some of the paid hosts.
leiban Posted April 29, 2011 Posted April 29, 2011 I am not sure of this but I guess hostingforfree.us allows/offer shell access on their free hosting service.
Ashoat Posted April 29, 2011 Posted April 29, 2011 I don't think so. Their "Plan Free" lists only FTP, but their "Plan Easy" (ie. not free) offers both FTP and SSH.
leiban Posted April 30, 2011 Posted April 30, 2011 I have the free and got an access to it. But maybe I'm wrong because I haven't touch it for the reason they might terminate my account.
Guest Geoff Posted April 30, 2011 Posted April 30, 2011 Looks like their bandwidth limit is exceeded.
jje Posted April 30, 2011 Author Posted April 30, 2011 LOL - yup! @djbob - Could we start doing some security audits so we could offer SSH in the future?
Ashoat Posted May 2, 2011 Posted May 2, 2011 Remind me in a month and I'll see if I can find some folks to do it. I'm a little swamped with work right now
leiban Posted May 2, 2011 Posted May 2, 2011 So this will come in the near future? This would be great but won't it make the server more unsecure?
jje Posted May 2, 2011 Author Posted May 2, 2011 We will only offer SSH if we are certain it is secure enough. We will carry out security audits to ensure that the server could not be affected by the use of SSH.
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