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Hello, I thought I'd take a couple of minutes to say just how much I appreciate HelioHost and I'm really glad it's still around, as without it I would not be where I am today. Before HelioHost I was using silly things like Weebly and/or Webs, not doing proper coding just placing together a website and seeing what came out of it. Then when I was in school, someone I knew had started making a website by coding in HTML and CSS and they mentioned it was hosted on a subdomain by HelioHost, so I took a look, back then it was a nightmare to get your website up and running on HelioHost, or I was just really stupid.. probably the second one. After I managed to get it sorted out and running, I logged in and was amazed at what I saw. I loved the freedom I got with the free webhosting and subdomain, it was a whole new world. Then I was purchased a CSS/HTML book and I started taking tips from that and tips from the internet, and over time I progressed to become a better website developer, even now I'm not the best but I can make do and I get the things I want done.. my websites have improved since a few years ago too and I've even made some websites for people and been paid for it! I was using HelioHost on and off for a good year or two before I stepped away and looked into getting my own domain and some webhosting from another place as HelioHost took a little tumble and had regular issues, then I went into new projects and a few years later joined up with a friend to make a very popular music website (SmashLeaks) which unfortunately has now closed down, we used Wordpress for this and I did coding as and when I could to improve the site. More recently I made a website for my Mother's work, a website for a hobby she enjoys (which I was paid for) and I'm currently working on making a website for a Parkour and Free-running group called TeamShift. I honestly feel though, that without HelioHost I would not have made it to where I am today, I'm working at a company called PlugPayPlay which sells gameserver hosting, etc, but I would never have got into this if I had never got into webhosting as it all sprung off of each other, from web development to gaming to joining the company. I joined in October 2011 but was there for a short while before leaving, then rejoined in May 2012 and have officially been here an entire year now and I've progressed to become the Director of Sales and Marketing and have helped to take the company to new heights. I'd like to take this chance to thank HelioHost for existing as without it my life could have been completely different. If you're considering web development, then go for it, just do it, what do you have to lose? Start out like I did, a noobie to it all and learn from the professionals. Use free templates, modify them, that's another way that I learnt was modifying existing templates and learning how the code works and why. It was only recently yesterday that it came to my attention HelioHost still exist and I'm so glad that they do, HelioHost helped massively. Thank you.

One of the biggest problems on forums these days is lack of good forum etiquette. What some of the newer users of message boards don't understand is that forums have a very different environment from a chatroom, an instant message conversation, or even an email correspondence. Users of respectable message boards are expected to act maturely. And therefore, to help some of our newer users, I have created this guide to maintaining good forum etiquette. Use spelling and grammar correctly. Always capitalize the first letter in a sentence, even if you only have one to post. Always use periods. Capitalize only when necessary. Remember, all caps means you're yelling. Use commas and punctuation marks. The only excuse you can have for bad spelling or grammar is that you are not a native of an English-speaking country, and even then, you should do your best to learn English.Don't post just to up your post count. In fact, don't even pay attention to your post count. The senior members of a forum aren't respected because they have lots of posts, but because they are good contributors. You should strive to do the same.When you post, make it in-depth. Never just say "I agree" or "Good idea." Describe your idea. Say "I agree because..." or "Good idea. I think..." We want to hear a developed opinion, not just a short statement. Two or three word posts aren't really contributing anything to the forum.Know what you're talking about. Most forums are a community of experts and enthusiasts, and they love to discuss their passions. However, if you go into a topic you don't know much about and say something ignorant, it'll really tick them off. Especially if you stated it with authority.Never ask someone a question you can could easily get answered through a search engine or an encyclopedia. People expect you to find things out on your own instead of getting other members to do it for you. Laziness is frowned upon.Make sure never to turn a topic into back-and-forth conversations on random things. Topics are made for a reason - to discuss something. If you go into a topic and turn it into something completely irrelevant from what it was intended to discuss, you're only ruining it for the users who seriously want to discuss that topic.Don't just go through every topic in a forum posting in each one. Most people will find it hard to believe that you actually have something important to contribute to a topic if you post all over the place.Don't overdramatize unimportant things. There is no need to post a sorry thread if you broke a rule, or make a big deal when something doesn't apply to you. If you made a mistake, no big deal. If you follow these rules, people will forget all about it in a month or so.Don't freak out if no one responds. People have things they need to deal with outside of HelioNet. If you have a question and it has gone several days without being answered, kindly bump the thread up so others may see it.These are just the basics of forum etiquette. You'll learn much more as you post and interact with the community. We won't chastise you for a mistake, but we expect you to do your best to follow this guide. Good luck, and happy foruming © Copyright Helio Networks 2006-2009

A new European law is coming into force which means that websites must make their users aware of what cookies are and receive some form of consent. Although HelioNetworks (HelioHost and HelioNet) is based within the United States, I would like to clarify how we use cookies at HelioNetworks. By using our services and browsing our website, you are giving consent for us to place cookies on your computer. In case you are not already aware, cookies are little pieces of information that are placed on your computer. We use cookies for a variety of reasons, such as analytics, secure logins, etc. Below is a list of cookies which we have picked up on. Please be aware there may be more that we have not noticed. The below list my change at any time without notification Cookies from heliohost.org __utma __utmb __utmc __utmz _jsuid first_pv_51643 A randomly generated session cookie Cookies from helionet.org helionetcoppa helionetmember_id helionetpass_hash helionetsession_id Cookies from cPanel (stevie.heliohost.org:2082, johnny.heliohost.org:2082, etc) cprelogin cpsession didgettingstarted lang langedit logintheme showdotfiles Cookies from doubleclick.net (Advertising - see the website for details if any) _drt_ id Cookies from getclicky.com & in.getclicky.com & static.getclicky.com (Analytics - see the website for details if any) _cfduid cluid Cookies from invitemedia.com (Advertising - see the website for details if any) camp_freq_p1 exchange_uid impressions_p1 io_freq_p1 subID uid Comments are welcome. Thank you very much. jje HelioNetworks Administrator

THE FOLLOWING WILL NOT BE TOLERATED:-Excessive use of profanity or bad languageBob: F*** you!!!-DiscriminationBob: Whites are superior to blacks.Bob: Buddhists suck!!!-Posts meant to offend or hurt another memberBob: Joe sucks!!!-WarezBob: You can get all games for free!!! Just download a crack!!!-Pornographic Material or SuggestionsBob: XXX FREE [bleeped!]!!!-ImpersonationBob: Hi I'm Joe.Joe: No, I'm Joe!-Multiple UsernamesBob1: Hi, I'm Bob.Bob2: I'm also Bob!Bob3: All three of us are the same person!-Using Proxies When PostingBob: Hey, check it out, I am using a proxy!!Please see the Official Spam Guide for more information on spam, which is also prohibited. Infraction of these rules will result in a Helion subtraction and/or ban, according to the Official Enforcement Guide.Use of this website and its forums indicates that you have agreed to the above terms. If you have NOT agreed, please discontinue use of the website and/or Helio Networks and its services.Thank you.

The Temporary Banning SystemWe will temporarily ban you in the following situations: Violation of the Official Spam Guide will result in a Temporary Ban for each consecutive five violations. This means you will recieve a ban on your 5th, 10th, 15th and so forth violations. The length of the ban depends on the number of times you have already been banned. If this is your first ban, it will last 5 days. Your second will last 10 days, your third 15 days, and so forth. Violation of the Official Rules Guide will result in a Temporary Ban for each consecutive two violations. This means you will recieve a ban on your 2nd and 4th violations. The length of the ban depends on the number of times you have already been banned. Your first ban will last 10 days. Your second will last 20 days. Where a moderator deems it necessary. The Permanent Banning SystemWe will permanently ban you in the following situations: Violation of the Official Rules Guide will result in a Permanent Ban on your 5th violation. Doing something the owner (djbob) or any software of the Helio Networks (that includes HelioHost) did not intend for you to have permission to do. Where an admin deems it necessary. The Official Spam Guide is available here. The Official Rules Guide is available here. The Official Etiquette Guide is available here.Use of this website and its forums indicates that you have agreed to the above terms. If you have NOT agreed, please discontinue use of the website and/or Helio Networks and its services.Thank you.

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.

THE FOLLOWING IS CONSIDERED SPAM:-Irrelevant PostsBob: The iPod is my favorite MP3 player. What's your favorite?Joe: I like cheese.-Topics that don't mean anything or ask a questionBob: I like posting-Posts that don't contributeBob: YES!! I just got an iPod!!Joe: iPods SUCK!!!-Questions that are obvious or easily answered by using search engines, dictionaries, encyclopedias, etc.Bob: Where is Apple's website?-Repeatedly adding one to three word posts that don't take much thoughtBob: Do you have an iPod?Joe: Oh yes, it is very cool, here is why: [REVIEW GOES HERE]Bob: CoolBill: What's so cool about an iPod?Bob: MP3-AdvertisingBob: Go to www.apple.com get the iPod it is really cool!-Unneccesary bumpingBob: [bump]Bob: [bump]Bob: [bump]-Repeatedly posting similiar topics without much purposeBob: What do you think of the iPod?Bob: What do you think of the Zune?Bob: What do you think of the Gigabeat?Failure to abide by these rules will result in a Helion subtraction and/or ban, according to the Official Enforcement Guide, except in extreme circumstances.Use of this website and its forums indicates that you have agreed to the above terms. If you have NOT agreed, please discontinue use of the website and/or Helio Networks and its services.Thank you.

We're getting closer to having Tommy ready to begin transferring accounts over. In order to help test the new Plesk server we will be gradually rolling out account transfers through a Tommy beta test. We have made a list of donors from the last year, and those who have donated the most will be getting first access to the new control panel. Things are a little rough around the edges right now, and not all the features that we will eventually offer are ready to go yet though. Tomcat hasn't been installed yet, but we hope to offer Java/JSP service on Tommy again soon. Node.js is already available, as well as PHP 8.0, 7.4, 7.3, 7.2, 7.1, 7.0, 5.6, 5.5, and 5.4. We're really excited to offer the latest PostgreSQL version 13.3 which is a huge improvement over the PostgreSQL 9.2 that cPanel provided. We also have MariaDB 10.6 installed which is a huge upgrade from MySQL 5.7 that cPanel provides. If you're not familiar with MariaDB it's basically what MySQL should have become. The founder of MySQL started the MariaDB open source project when Oracle, a for-profit company, took over control of MySQL. We don't have the DNS situation set up quite yet, as it's going to require a lot of custom code. That means that Tommy users won't be able to add new domains themselves or edit DNS records. That will be fixed eventually. There may also be a lot of other issues that we haven't even discovered yet, and that's why we need brave donors to help test things out for us. If you have any questions about what is available let us know. If you're a donor and don't want to help test the new server quite yet you can opt out by letting us know and we'll transfer you over when things are a little more ironed out. If you're not a donor and you want early access to the Tommy server it's not too late to become a donor either. When your account is transferred you will receive an email explaining how to log in. We're hoping to begin transferring the first accounts in the next week or so. We're just announcing the beginning of the transfer early so people can opt out of the beta test if they want to.

Yeah...that's not surprising. HelioHost does not tolerate phishing activity of any type, whether it be phishing websites, emails, or the sale or distribution of software for phishing. Can you explain what you were planning to do with it?

We just heard back from Let's Encrypt regarding our rate limit increase request. They have increased our limit even more than we asked for. That means that everyone will be able to get free SSL automatically and easily through Plesk, and when we start offering new accounts they will all come with SSL too. We asked for a rate limit increase a few years ago and Let's Encrypt never even responded to us, so this is amazing news.

The data center visit and hard drive install went great on Monday. Ashoat was at the data center working on the servers for almost 12 hours so everyone give him a big round of applause. Now that the new hard drives are installed and tested we will be moving Johnny to the new drive later today. This means Johnny will be down, likely for several hours, and most of the VPS will experience slower speeds due to the hard drive running at 100% speed copying Johnny over. After Johnny is fully moved and booted back up the newly separated VPS and Johnny should both be quite a bit faster.

Having free hosting is great, but you also need a domain in order to get your website online. You could of course use a free subdomain from your webhost, but that generally limits your options and means you cannot transfer your website elsewhere without having to change your URL as well. That's the problem a free domain solves. This list is composed of providers who offer free domains at no charge and give you full DNS control as well as the ability to use your own nameservers (or the nameservers of HelioHost). Free domain providers: FreeNOM - The company previously responsible for .tk is now also poviding free .cf, .ga and .ml domains. This is the only provider who offers free top level domains. But be warned, .eu.org - Free subdomain with rather complicated registration procedure. But this provider has been around since 1996 and most likely will be around for a long time. nom.za - This is a special provider. The good news: nom.za domains are not free subdomains, they are valid third level domains just like .co.uk domains. The bad news: there are a lot of strings attached to managing a .nom.za domain, which you can find on their website (and are too extensive to be covered here). FreeDNS: FreeDNS is a service where people can submit their domains so other people can get subdomains from it. This community oriented nature means there are over 100,000 domains in there pool and many of them can be used to get free subdomains. Source: This list has been made possible using the list from http://getfreedomain.name/ Dead links (that may come back): Free Available Domains - A clean, no nonsense provider with free subdomains of usa.cc, sxx.in, flu.cc, nut.cc, ibiz.cc, igg.biz and tld.cc. .cu.cc - A popular free subdomain provider. They have been doing quite well in the last few years and have a neat referral program to earn some extra money. Interdots: Interdots is a company with many different "registrars" under them. Each registrar is responsible for a number of domains they provide subdomains for, with each registrar being responsible for a different top level domain. Except for their names and domains they offer, all registrars are almost the same so if you've tried one, you've tried them all. nic.de.vu - providing free subomdains of various .vu, .tc and .ms domains PopNIC - providing free subdomains with the .pn TLD NeuNIC - providing free subdomains with the .vc TLD HomeNIC - providing free subdomains with the .hm TLD UNONIC - providing free subdomains with the .tf TLD MediaDots - providing free subdomains with the .mn TLD LavaNIC - providing free subdomains with the .lv TLD

The first of the Tommy beta test invitation emails have been sent. The invites are being sent to our top donors on the Tommy server whose accounts have properties we want to test with the transfer script. Once all aspects of the transfer script are fully tested we will proceed to transfer all of the accounts. Please check your email in case you have been selected for the beta test.

On a VPS you get the entire server to yourself. By default it's just a bare operating system with SSH command line access, but you can install any web based control panel you want except for cPanel. If you install cPanel and pay those bastards a single cent I will delete your VPS myself. One popular configuration is Ubuntu 20 operating system and Hestia free control panel. You can of course do everything from the command line too without a web based control panel. In that case you would just install a web server, such as Apache or Nginx, and then you would need to install Postgresql and import your databases in, and you would need to install a php version as well. Control panels can make all that easier to manage by installing it all for you. Feel free to do some research on control panels before you submit your vps request. Some control panels only work on certain operating systems so you would need to select the custom option, and choose your os. Ubuntu 20 with Hestia does support Apache, Postgresql, and PHP which you use now.

Both Johnny and Tommy now have fully licensed Softaculous available to everyone to install the latest version of 459 different software packages with just a single click. If you're not familiar with Softaculous it automates the installation of most popular software with the latest version, and can help you easily stay up to date as well. Since we offer free hosting we attract a lot of people who are new to web hosting, and installing some software can be very confusing if you don't know what you're doing. With Softaculous you just pick the software, enter a few variables, and click install. When we switched control panels we canceled our Softaculous subscription because Plesk comes with a built in software installer, but after using it for a few years we found it to have very out of date software, and not very many options. We recently reached out to Softaculous and they agreed to give us a non-profit discount to help us fulfill our mission to provide high quality, free or low cost hosting options to students, small businesses, and anyone who can't afford paid hosting. We hope you enjoy it. Let us know how it works for you if you test it out.

We've made a lot of progress towards converting to Plesk. Our database which was over 18,000 users has been cleaned up, slimmed down, and restructured in preparation for the upcoming control panel switch. All of the existing archived accounts have been moved from archived state to backed up state. That means that all accounts are now available to download from https://www.heliohost.org/backup/ instead of just the active accounts. Some accounts backup links were changed in this process so if you have a link from a month ago it won't work anymore. If you need to download your backup you can just submit your email address and username again to get the new link. If you're having trouble downloading your backup let us know and we can help. We've also been hard at work converting all of our internal admin tools to support Plesk. In most cases they have to be completely rewritten from the ground up which, as you might imagine, takes quite a bit of time. Some of the code we were using still was written in 2008 so this is a great opportunity to modernize our systems as well. Currently we're still testing the account transfer process from cPanel to Plesk to make sure it works 100% correctly before we start using it on real accounts. We plan to start transferring real accounts, if everything goes well, as soon as this weekend. We'll keep you updated, and when your account is transferred we'll email you to let you know how to log in to Plesk.

By now you may have noticed that Stevie didn't boot up yesterday like we were hoping. Rest assured that we're still working with the Hurricane Electric technicians on site with the server to try to get him running again. If we can get Stevie booted up we will try to give a warning via a news post before he comes back online so that the largest number of people can get their backups in case he crashes again right away. At this point if the technicians can't get Stevie running again we may have to wait until a Heliohost admin visits California to see what we can do with the server in person. Our deepest apologies for the inconvenience this unexpected downtime has caused. It really caught us by surprise as Stevie has had 99%+ uptime for every month for the last 6 years or so. There was no warning whatsoever prior to the first crash.

Everyone please welcome the newest addition to our HelioHost staff, KazVee! A question that we get a lot is how to get promoted to admin. You need to do exactly what KazVee did by helping out on the forums and Discord with simple questions that don't require admin access. Since she continued helping out we took notice and offered to give her access to the admin tools so she can help out even more. Since we switched to Plesk control panel in 2021 a lot of our documentation on the wiki became extremely out of date. KazVee took it upon herself to completely overhaul and update our documentation which benefits all of our users. We've been asking our users to help out with the wiki for years, and KazVee was the one who finally stepped up and volunteered to take care of it. Here at HelioHost we all started as regular users helping out like KazVee, and eventually got promoted.

Tommy is now back online and running! Since Tommy was powered off uncleanly there was quite a bit of corruption for anything that was being written to the disk at the time of the power loss. Most of it has been cleaned up, but there may be some issues here and there that still need to be fixed. The hard drive had it's partition table corrupted so we had to rebuild all of those. The XFS partitions had unwritten log data so we had to mount each one to write the log data to disk, then unmount them again, and run xfs_repair on each partition. Since the master boot record was corrupted we had to reinstall grub2 on the disk. The initramfs was corrupted too so we had to rebuild that as well. Then the main Plesk database uses InnoDB engine which always breaks whenever there is any sort of unclean shutdown, so we had to fix each table one by one until Plesk would run. The Apache config files and Nginx config files had a couple vhosts that were corrupted so that had to be fixed before they would boot up. Anyways, everyone's websites should be online now and you should be able to login. Please report any errors that you see so we can fix them. If you have an InnoDB database you might need to back it up, drop it, and import it back in. There isn't really any way to repair it otherwise. We still and always have recommended MyISAM tables for this reason.

All of the users who are still on the cPanel version of Tommy have now received their invites to move to Plesk as of last Tuesday the 7th. We will finally be shutting down Tommy cPanel on Thursday the 16th. If you haven't moved your account off cPanel by then your account will be backed up and your website will be taken offline. Also Thursday the 16th is when we will turn inactivity monitoring back on for Tommy Plesk so make sure you get logged in before then. Let us know if you haven't received your invite yet, or if you have any questions.

Great news! We are now sending out invites to donors again starting immediately. We started sending new account creation invites using slightly modified cPanel code a while back, but quickly realized that there were too many bugs. We decided to start over entirely and redesign the new account creation process again from the ground up with Plesk in mind. It was a lot more work, but we think it was worth it. The previous cPanel new account creation code has remained largely untouched since it was implemented in 2016, and we created over 100k accounts using that old code. We've learned a lot from our time creating so many accounts, and we hope that the new Plesk code will perform even better. We also have more great news! Gmail has begun delivering our emails instead of deleting them. More often than not the emails end up in the spam box, but if you flag them as not spam future emails will be delivered to the inbox. It's a great step in the right direction, and a lot better than our invites being deleted entirely. If you're not a big fan of email, or you're afraid you'll miss your invite in the spam box you can link your Discord account or improve your position in the queue using the ETA page https://heliohost.org/eta/ All of the HelioHost staff are really excited to be able to create new accounts again, and we're hoping this feature rollout will go smoothly. Once all the donors are on Plesk we will begin moving the free accounts as well. We will start out only sending a few invites per day, but as the new account creation gets well tested we will increase the rate of invites. Now that new account creation is implemented we can turn our attention to other tasks such as getting Django and Flask running on Tommy, setting up Johnny, and adding or deleting domains through Plesk. If you have any issues or have any questions let us know.

We've updated https://heliohost.org to allow logins to Plesk. There have also been countless improvements under the hood to make the homepage faster and more secure. The main difference though is our main website is now running on PHP 8.0, but up until a few minutes ago was running on PHP 5.4 which lost active support almost 8 years ago. We have a lot more changes coming soon such as password resets, changing your main domain, upgrading your storage, deleting your account, load graphs, and a lot more through your new hosting dashboard. We've also made some massive improvements to our VPS signup process that should result in less confusion, and make things easier for VPS customers. We've also added a very basic VPS dashboard which is mostly just links to post your support requests on the forum, but eventually you will be able upgrade your VPS, reinstall your OS, set up reverse DNS, cancel your subscription, and a lot more through the website. Let us know what you think about the new functionality, and if you see anything broken please let us know. Thanks for being a part of the HelioHost community.

Happy Easter everyone! If you're not familiar with Christianity the meaning of Easter is to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus after his death by crucifixion. Therefore, I think this is a fitting day to celebrate the resurrection of HelioHost as well. Last year we were surprised to learn that our cPanel licenses that we've been using for 16 years were revoked and they tried to extort us for over $17,000 which we obviously can't afford because we provide free hosting. We quickly made a new partnership with Plesk instead, and began trying to upgrade our servers to use the new control panel. Clearly there have been a lot of issues since then, and unfortunately the work still isn't fully complete. This process has already taken an unacceptably long time so we've decided that the time is long overdue to start moving accounts to the new control panel. Since not all of our services are currently available on the new server we will be giving each user a choice whether they want to move now, or continue to stay on the broken cPanel for a while longer. For instance Java, Django, Flask, and some other things aren't available on Plesk yet, but we do plan to add support eventually. If you have questions about what is or is not available feel free to ask on the forums in this news post. You can check your place in line to be moved at https://www.heliohost.org/eta/ or improve your position with a donation if you wish to. If there is a feature that you need on Plesk for your website to function please let us know so we can prioritize the features that the most number of people need. Part of this decision to start moving accounts is due to Johnny being taken offline. We will be monitoring the load on the new Plesk server, and as long as we have space to fit more websites we will be upgrading existing Johnny and Ricky accounts to Tommy for free for being so patient during this excessively long upgrade process. Once we have all the existing accounts taken care of we will open new registrations as well. If you have any questions feel free to ask. Thanks for being a HelioHost user.

Tomorrow, 2021-08-30 starting around 7pm UTC, we will be doing maintenance at our data center which will cause downtime on all of our servers and VPS, including our main website heliohost.org and our forums helionet.org. We estimate the downtime will probably be around an hour for each server as long as we don't run into any significant issues. Our last fundraiser was successful and we are now installing the hardware that we raised the money to purchase. This will increase the performance of Johnny, Ricky, and all of our VPS as well. The fundraiser also paid for network hardware speed improvements which were completed earlier which allows for faster downloads from all of our servers and mitigates the effects of ddos attacks. We will also be installing some hard drives for a new server named Morty that we hope to release in a few months after we finish rebuilding Tommy, Ricky, and Johnny with Plesk.

We thought people might be wondering how the transition to Plesk is going so here is an update. We have reduced the size of the Tommy cPanel server from 16 GB of memory down to 10 GB of memory, and created a new Plesk Tommy server with 10 GB of memory. We're going to keep the cPanel version of Tommy running while we continue setting up the Plesk version of Tommy at the same time. Then when the Plesk version of Tommy is ready we will begin moving accounts from cPanel to Plesk with zero downtime. Once all the cPanel accounts are converted into Plesk accounts we will shutdown the cPanel version of Tommy, and increase the memory of the Plesk server to 20 GB. If you have an active account on Tommy you will receive an email when your account is converted to Plesk. Setting up Plesk is taking a little longer than we expected because we're having trouble getting Plesk to interact with our nameservers. None of the DNS extensions we've tried are working, so we're going to write our own extension which will allow Plesk users to be able to add domains, and update their DNS records. Existing accounts can be moved, and we can write a custom script to edit the DNS records of each account when the account is transferred, but until we get this extension written it won't be possible to edit DNS records through Plesk or add new domains without admin assistance. After Tommy is done being converted we will begin work on Ricky which shouldn't take nearly as long because we've already worked through all the Plesk issues while setting up Tommy. Then Johnny will be last to be converted. Just like with Tommy we plan to do zero downtime transfers from existing cPanel to Plesk accounts by running duplicate copies of the servers at the same time. We'll provide more details in the coming weeks. Let us know if you have any questions. Thanks for your patience during this unexpected control panel upgrade.

I wonder what cP is thinking right now now that we dropped them in under 24 hours. cP: "Hey these guys have been a 16 year customer and we're losing money on them, they'll just pay up if we demand 17k no matter how small they are" HH: Switches to Plesk. cP: *pikachu face* (if they had done any research on us, they'd realize we quite literally can't afford their product). As for why cP is so expensive nowadays, digging shows that apparently they'd gotten bought back in late 2018 by a VC firm...which explains the massive price hikes they had. VC firms basically exist to extract as much money as they can from an acquired company. Either it becomes extremely profitable (often at the expense of its customer base) and they ride the gravy train for a while then sell it, or they fail at making it profitable, in which case they squeeze what they can out then pile debt from other investments into it and let it go bankrupt (see Toys r us).

I'm going to assume it has something to do with the 20+ databases that used all the resources of our server, violating our Terms of Service. It could also have something to do with trying to run spam sites with our services. Also... What does this have to do with anything? We've always been a community. A ticketing system is unfeasible given our staff of volunteers. No one has controlled you. What? We warned you at at the beginning to keep backups. It is not our fault that you failed to read/heed our Terms of Service. No one can help you if you do not speak up. HelioHost is a not-for-profit organization that has been running for over five years. I don't think we're scamming anyone. Maybe you also should find better things to do with your time besides ranting. Again, this is a volunteer effort for a organization that provides a free service. We do this in our spare time. I agree. You shouldn't judge people that you don't know. We have been professional with you. We also bathe regularly. I attend the University of California, Berkeley. I have worked at Amazon and am working at Google next summer. What have you done lately? This is your first and final warning. If you continue being disruptive, you will be banned and your hosting account removed.

Even after opening free signups twice per day, instead of once per day like the last 19 years, free accounts are still filling consistently in only a few seconds in both time slots. Since the stability of Johnny is still doing great so we're going to increase the number of accounts we give away each day. As long as the uptime and speed of Johnny stays good we'll continue trying to give away as many accounts as we can support each day.

Free signups on Johnny now reset every 12 hours at midnight UTC and noon UTC. For the last 8 years we've been offering new free signups starting at midnight UTC and staying open as long as we can, but also not allowing too many accounts to keep the uptime high. This works great for most of the world. For instance, signups reset at 4pm to 8pm in the US, 10pm in Brazil, 12am in England, 1am in France, 1am in Germany, 2pm in Hawaii, 7pm in Peru, 1pm in New Zealand, 8am to 11am in Australia, 9am in Japan, 8am in China, 5:30am in India, etc. However, between India and Germany not many people are awake when signups open. We get a lot of complaints from people living in those areas, and our responses have always been, "I had to stay up until 2am three nights in a row to get my account", or "I had to stay up until 3am to get my account", or "You could just donate $1 and get an account whenever", or "You're lucky because there wasn't even an option to donate back in the day when I got my account". Johnny has been really stable the last year since we started offering free signups again, and we feel like we can increase the number of new accounts that we give out each day. Instead of increasing the number of accounts available at midnight UTC we instead decided to offer signups twice per day to help out those people who don't want to set an alarm and wake up at 4am just to get a free hosting account. Let us know what you think of this change.

We have received quite a few false positive malware reports for our website. The reason is because of the Arc.io CDN that we've been using for the last few years. When we started using it we were getting about $500 per year which is a great source of income for a non-profit, and the little blue dot in the bottom left corner was no where near as annoying as regular ads. In the last year we've made less than $15 from it though, and most antivirus programs and malware programs now report the CDN as malware. We've decided that it is no longer worth it. We can probably get more than $15 per year from donations from people who would have otherwise avoided our website due to the false malware report. There is no way to know how many people have found our website, but decided to use a different hosting provider because of this issue. We've contacted the antivirus and malware detection companies plenty of times, but they won't fix the issue on their end. One of our VPS customers can't even pay for his VPS because his computer refuses to even open our payment page, and he can't figure out how to turn off his antivirus or whitelist our website. Thanks for all the money over the years, Arc.io, but the time has come to move on. If you use an antivirus or malware product that reports our website is bad please submit another false positive report for us now that Arc.io is gone, and hopefully we can get this mess cleaned up together. Thanks!

Everyone please welcome the newest addition to our HelioHost staff, MoneyBroz. A question that we get a lot is how to get promoted to admin. You need to do exactly what MoneyBroz did by helping out on the forums and Discord with simple questions that don't require admin access. Since he continued helping out we took notice and offered to give him access to the admin tools so he can help out even more. Here at HelioHost we all started as regular users helping out like MoneyBroz, and eventually got promoted.

Hello @chamnabyun. If you have an account on one of the shared host servers (Tommy, Johnny, Ricky) then you can't access SSH for security reasons: https://wiki.helionet.org/faq#can-i-use-ssh However if you have a VPS server then you can easily have access to SSH: Login on https://heliohost.org/login/ with your account's username and password. Click on "Connect to SSH on your VPS." (our just click here: https://heliohost.org/dashboard/ssh/). On that page you'll have access to your VPS IP address, SSH service connection port and your username (your password is the same as your HelioHost account you used to login on dashboard). Use Putty (if your OS is Windows), Google Chrome's extension "Secure Shell" (any OS that runs Chrome) or run "ssh" on your terminal (if your OS is either Mac, Linux, BSDs etc.). Note: I did a briefly explanation about SSH connection because I'm considering that you do know how to use it. If it isn't your case reply providing your OS and I'll post a specific step-to-step for you. Also, if you found any errors while trying to connect to a VPS using SSH, please provide as many details as possible (error message, what OS and software you're using to connect to your server etc.) so we can provide a better support for you.

We're happy to announce that new account signups are beginning today. One year ago today without any warning we lost our cPanel licenses that we had been using for over 16 years. HelioHost has been through good times and bad, and the last year is definitely the worst we've experienced. We're coming back bigger and better than ever though. Starting today we will be sending out invites to create a new account on Plesk starting with our biggest donors over the last two years. You can check your ETA and check the current number of invites we are sending out each day at https://www.heliohost.org/eta/ If you're not on the list let us know and we can add you. We will be sending out only 1 invite per day for a few days to make sure everything is working, and then we will increase the number of invites each day as everything gets tested. A huge thanks goes out to all of our donors who have kept HelioHost alive through the last year.

Personal medical issues plus my dad nearly dying in a car crash have delayed the process a bit. I'm still working on it though. Both my dad and I are doing fine, but dealing with all this is taking up most of my free time right now. I hope to have more free time when my dad can drive himself around in a week or so, and isn't on so many pain medications, and doesn't need to see so many doctors, etc. Thanks for checking in, and not giving up.

Thanks. Sorry it's taking so long, but like I said I'd rather spend a little extra time up front rather than making thousands of mistakes worth of extra work later.

If you upload files to cPanel and then get moved to Plesk the new files and changes will transfer over so feel free to continue trying to update your site as best as you can. We will not be restoring the backups we made a month ago onto the Plesk servers. Those were just provided for anyone who wants to download a copy of everything. We will be copying directly from the broken cPanel server straight into Plesk.

If you think he's joking, go right ahead.

We have finally upgraded our forum! The software we were running for our support forum was written in 2013 so it was long overdue for an upgrade. You can still find the old forum located at https://classic.helionet.org/ if you need it. The new forum was upgraded from a backup made on June 13th so all new forum accounts and all new posts for the last two weeks only exist on the old forum not the new one. We will provide support on both forums for a while we get all the kinks worked out of the new system. Let us know if you notice anything acting strangely.

In the morning at about 11am I'm having trouble connecting with mysql service on the server stevie , thank cualquiern information on the subject. tankyou in the morning at about 11am I'm having trouble connecting with mysql service on the server stevie , thank cualquiern information on the subject

Heliohost is in the process of getting a new server, and we would like to let our users know how they can help! This new server will be better, faster, and stronger than all of our current servers, and will allow us to provide free hosting to even more eager Heliohost users. Why do we need a new server? You may have noticed that our main website http://heliohost.org/ our forum http://helionet.org/ and our Johnny accounts have been getting progressively slower and slower. This is a problem! We've outgrown our current array of servers, and by adding a new server we will be able to alleviate the above problems. We expect Johnny accounts to get a lot more stable, and have drastically improved uptime. We expect our homepage, and our forums to load quicker. Best of all, we will be adding a new server that users can create accounts on to help ease the over-crowding on both Stevie and Johnny. How can YOU help? New servers cost a lot of money in up-front cost, monthly bills, and work for our admins. We would love for our users to be able to help out with this process. Most free hosts are just schemes to try to sell you paid services, but here at Heliohost we believe that hosting should be FREE! Not just a crappy free hosting scheme with such restrictive settings that you can't actually run a real website. Heliohost is different. One of the most common questions we get from our users is, "How does Heliohost provide quality hosting for free?" Donations Like most free services Heliohost relies on donations from its users to continue operation. If you can spare any amount even as little as $1 it will help. To make a donation right now you can visit https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=P63828V7WFM54 Ad Revenue A lot of our money comes from ad revenue. If you can't afford to make a donation you can still help out by whitelisting Heliohost in your ad blocker. If you view the ads on our homepage, the forums, and your cpanel interface it all adds up to money that we can use to continue operation and improve our services. In addition to whitelisting and viewing our ads you can also click ads that appeal to you. Clicking ads provides Heliohost with even more money than just viewing the ads. There are even browser addons that will click the ads for you if you want to install something like that to help us out. Social Media As a free service Heliohost would rather spend our money on providing better service to our users than spend our money on advertising to get more new users. This means that we rely on our existing users to spread word of mouth recommendations of Heliohost's services. The easiest way to help advertise Heliohost is by using social media to let all of your friends and followers know about us. You can like us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/HelioHost-133105633434140/ You can follow us on twitter and you can even give us +1 on google plus if you use that https://plus.google.com/116755433050903410191 Write a review Setting up a new website, or moving your existing website to a new hosting service is a lot of work. People want to know how good a host is before they go to all that work so writing up an honest review of our services is a great way to help out. If there's something you love about Heliohost let everyone know. If there's something you think we could improve on let everyone, especially us, know about that too. There are hundreds of host reviewing websites on the internet in every language imaginable so it's beyond the scope of this news post to start listing them all. Just get creative in your google queries. Post about us in a group that you belong to. Let people at your school know about us. If you speak a language other than English we would love for you to write recommendations to use our service in all languages too. Help other users Did you know that Heliohost admins are volunteers? Did you know that any Heliohost user can be promoted to admin simply by being helpful and answering the questions of their fellow users on our forums http://helionet.org/ and our http://www.heliohost.org/home/support/chat IRC channel? With the addition of a new server we will need even more admins to help out with the added numbers of users. Now is a great time to earn yourself that promotion by being helpful. Not only that but the best way to learn about all of the tricks of hosting is by trying to help other users. Ask any of Heliohost's admins and they will all agree that they've learned a ton and gained all sorts of useful experience by being an admin. But wait, there's more! Being a Heliohost admin is a lot of fun too! If you have any comments or suggestions regarding the new server we would love to hear from you. Thanks for being part of the Heliohost community.

Aww this is heartwarming to read

Sorry guys... the issue this time was that the shutdown caused actual disk corruption, so the process of checking the disk (fsck - "filesystem check") was more long and involved.

HelioHost is raising funds to buy a new server! Each $5 or more donation increases your Johnny or Tommy storage by 1000 MB up to a maximum of 6000 MB. Each $30 or more donation will receive an early access beta invite for Morty including 42 to 730 days prepaid with no inactivity and no load suspensions. It's been a tough couple of years. After losing our cPanel licenses it looked like that was going to be the end, but it takes more than that to kill HelioHost. We're coming back stronger and better than ever. The transition to the new Plesk control panel is almost done, and we're getting a steady stream of new users daily. We need more server space so we can provide hosting to even more people. To make this happen we need to buy a new server. The one we have picked out has 192 GB of memory, dual Xeon processors with 20 cores, and 8.1 TB of hard drive space. We will also be putting Morty on an SSD raid array for the best combination of speed and reliability. Click the link below to check out the fundraiser and see more details. https://www.gofundme.com/f/heliohosts-morty-server

The HelioHost staff have been working tirelessly for the last 12 hours, and we're happy to announce that we've already completed the repairs on heliohost.org, and we have both nameservers running again. The next step is getting Tommy back online. We're going to let the backup run through the rest of the night and we should be able to get Tommy powered on sometime tomorrow as long as everything goes well.

Merry Christmas! We decided it would be a good gift to everyone who has been waiting patiently for so long to start giving out free accounts again beginning at midnight UTC Christmas December 25th, which is about 13 hours from now. We aren't done transferring all of our existing users yet, but now that we have the Johnny server set up and running we will be able to increase the rate of invites we send out again. We got all of our donors on to Tommy, plus upgraded as many Ricky, and Johnny users to Tommy as would fit, but Tommy's uptime is starting to dip and the load is pretty high, so that means we can't fit any more accounts on there for now. We expect free signups to fill fairly quickly so if you check on December 25th and they're already full they will open again the next day at midnight UTC, and each day after. The signup page will give you an idea of how long free signups were open the previous day to help you plan ahead. The code for the signup page is fairly new so if you run into anything that seems like a bug let us know so we can fix it. We're still a long ways from fully functional, but HelioHost is coming back stronger than ever, and this is a huge step in the right direction. If you have any questions about anything feel free to ask.

Tommy and Ricky are both done backing up, and links to download the full backups have been emailed to all of the active accounts. If you didn't get an email for some reason you can download your backup from https://www.heliohost.org/backup/ If you're having trouble downloading your backup let us know and we can help. The backup files contain all of your files, databases, emails, and all of your cPanel settings. If you need any help extracting the information you're looking for from your backup let us know and we can help with that as well. Johnny is now backing up, and we expect that process to take about 3 days to complete. Since Tommy is done backing up we will be taking him offline soon to start installing Plesk.

15 years ago on March 2nd 2005 HelioHost was born. The last 15 years have had their ups and downs, but we managed to weather everything that was thrown our way and even thrive. We adamantly stuck to our ideals to continue providing free web hosting to thousands of users worldwide, and have grown considerably along the way. We started as a simple forum and cPanel reseller plan, then we moved to a VPS, followed by renting a dedicated server. After that in 2008 we bought our first server, Stevie, and two years later in 2010 we bought our second server, Charlie. Then in 2016 we bought our third server, Eddie. In 2018 we ran dangerously low on storage space so we reached out to the community by starting a fundraiser to buy more hard drive space. The fundraiser was a success and we used the extra space to create a Windows server named Lily. The extra storage space that the community funded has also allowed us to start offering affordable VPS subscriptions in addition to our free shared hosting plans. Finally, in 2019 we ran another successful fundraiser to buy our fourth server, Sparkie. We're not done either. We will continue to do what we're doing for as long as there is a need for free hosting. Who knows what the future will bring?

Our account creation process has been improved. When you create an account we actually create two accounts for you. One account is the hosting account itself, and the other is a forum account to make getting support easier. The way it worked before was if you deleted your hosting account you wouldn't be able to recreate that same username because your forum account still existed and would block anyone from choosing that username. This meant that you would need to get an admin to change your forum username temporarily before you would be able to recreate your hosting username. This was confusing for users because they would obviously think that since they can't reuse the username it must mean their old account wasn't deleted yet. It also made a lot more work for the admins because we would have to explain all of the above, then rename their forum account, and then rename it back once the new hosting account was created. Now the account creation process not only allows you to use the same username as a forum account, but actually suggests it if it finds an already existing forum account that matches your email address. This also means that no one else can steal your username while you're in the middle of moving between two servers, because the only way you can have a username that already exists on the forums is if you have access to that email address. The reason we implemented these changes now is because the Tommy server will be coming back online soon, and we want to make it as easy as possible for people to recreate their accounts. Let us know if you find any bugs or if things aren't behaving the way you would expect.

This isn't silly at all, in fact many people have been asking. When we get some more disk space and the new Lily server, we are going to offer the chance for people to buy more space. The exchange rate is $5 for 1000MB of space.

Moved and pinned to Website Management and Coding since it's most relevant, plus I think it'll be nice for users to read this when they get discouraged.