HelioHost

https://www.heliohost.org/heliomine/ We need people to help test our new program called HelioMine. It is software that we wrote that runs on Windows and mines cryptocurrency for HelioHost. If your PC is on anyways it's just sitting there using electricity, and all of its processing power is going to waste. Our program runs sort of like a screensaver in the background using the cpu when you aren't. That way we can harness all of this wasted power to generate a few cents here and a few cents there. It's not much, but if enough people run this program for us we could fully fund HelioHost with it. Just install the program, and use your computer as you normally would. The software tracks statistics that are linked to your hosting account by typing in your username during the install. We are going to be giving out rewards such as inactivity immunity, and even increased storage space soon. Let us know if you have any questions!

The long awaited, much anticipated upgrade to the java deployment system on Tommy has been released. This update should vastly improve the deployment speeds. Prior to this update java deployments could take up to 24 hours. We estimate that if you change the name of your .war file or if it's a new deployment it could take up to 60 minutes, and if you use the same filename as your previous deployment it could go live in just a couple minutes. Let us know if you have any issues with the new version.

We can now take card payments from Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, JCB, or UnionPay cards directly on our homepage. This means that if you make a donation with this page you will instantly receive your invite. This is a huge advantage over paypal/skrill because those Tommy invites can take up to 24 hours to arrive. If you're unable to use the card processing page let us know. We obviously still offer paypal/skrill donations for those who don't have these types of cards.

Thank you so much to all of our users! One week ago we needed $273.82 to break even for the month, and we ended up finishing the month of October strong with $252.92 over the cost of operation. That means we raised $526.74 in just one week! This is completely due to the overwhelming show of support that our users displayed after we sent out an email letting everyone know how badly October was going financially. It's really amazing that you all managed to pull this off, and it goes to show that many of you believe in what we're doing. It's obvious that with the much appreciated support of the HelioHost community we will be able to continue providing our services to both our donors, and also the less fortunate who can't donate but still deserve quality world class free hosting. Thanks again.

Users on Tommy should now be much less likely to see the max_user_connections error that has plagued many of you. After months of discussions with our users and testing on our accounts we have decided to increase this value. If you're account is on Johnny or Ricky and you consistently encounter this error your best course of action would be to move to Tommy. Since Ricky and Johnny have many more user accounts than Tommy the lower limit needs to be retained in order prevent one user from hogging all of the mysql connections.

Django on Tommy has been updated from 1.10.5 to the latest version of 1.11.6. This is a relatively minor update, but it's been almost a year since we've update django on Tommy so we figured it was time.

Python on Tommy has been upgraded to version 3.6.3 up from version 3.6.0. If your python 3.6 application required certain non-standard modules you might be seeing a 500 error after the upgrade. Please simply post at customer service listing the modules that you need installed on this new version of python just like you did originally. Enjoy the cutting edge new version of python that was released about a week ago.

Hi, I can't access my FTP via FileZilla as it says: Status: Resolving address of johnny.heliohost.org Status: Connecting to 65.19.141.67:21... Status: Connection established, waiting for welcome message... Status: Initializing TLS... Status: Verifying certificate... Status: TLS connection established. Command: USER admin@syngmod.heliohost.org Response: 331 User admin@syngmod.heliohost.org OK. Password required Command: PASS ******** Response: 530 Login authentication failed Error: Critical error: Could not connect to server I really need to access the FTP as I need to upload my website ASAP. Thanks.

Users on the Tommy server will now receive an email several days before your account is flagged inactive letting you know that you will need to log in to prevent your website(s) from going offline. We understand that once your website is perfected it's easy to forget that you need to log in to your control panel, but we need a way to tell which accounts are still being used and which have been abandoned. That's why we require monthly log ins. Since Tommy is our flagship production server the websites he hosts are extra important to keep online without any interuption. We think this early warning will help HelioHost users keep their uptime high. After we've tested this new feature on Tommy thoroughly we will be implementing it on Ricky and Johnny as well. Some of our oldest users might remember that we used to have email warnings like this years ago, but as our internal systems were upgraded and evolved the inactivity warnings were broken. We think this is a great feature to get working again because we understand the frustration of having our websites going offline. Let us know if you have any issues with the new emails or if you have any questions.

HelioHost now offers the latest and greatest php 7.2 on both Ricky and Tommy. https://krydos.heliohost.org/72/phpinfo.php This is in addition to php 5.4, 5.5, 5.6, 7.0, and 7.1 You can choose which version of php to use on your sites by clicking the MultiPHP Manager button in your cpanel. Each site can use a different version or even each directory. Let us know if you have any questions.

We invite users on the Tommy server to help us beta test a new feature we've been considering. A site builder. https://tommy.heliohost.org:2083/3rdparty/sitepad/index.live.php We understand that new users want to create their account and get a great looking site up as quickly as possible, but not everyone is an expert. We think having a site builder like this will allow our least experienced users to have a nice looking page quickly, and our more verteran users might appreciate the ease of use as well. If you're on the Tommy server test it out for us and let us know what you think. Is it worth paying for monthly after our free trial expires? Do you think enough people would use it to make it worth it? Thanks for the feedback.

Last night our datacenter was struck by a massive lightning bolt. The surge protectors worked and our servers weren't fried, but the strike caused a power outage that lasted a few hours. Not only HelioHost, but millions of other websites went dark during this downtime. When our servers started coming back online they were mostly undamaged, but unexpectedly disconnecting the power to any computer can cause issues. We've been busy pinpointing and fixing all of these little issues all last night and all day. Some people have had to simply change their password to log in and others have experienced some extended downtime on their sites, but everything should be pretty close to fixed now. If you notice anything weird let us know and we can take a look.

We are now testing a brand new automated java servlet deployment system on Tommy since this feature is so overwhelmingly popular. Previously you needed to make a post on the forums each time you wanted your java servlet deployed, and every time you updated your .war file you would need to make another post to request the new version be deployed. This lead to a lot of work for the admins, and a lot of confusion for our users. To remedy this we are developing a new system that is integrated directly into your control panel. If you're on the Tommy server and want to help us test it out just go to https://tommy.heliohost.org:2083/frontend/paper_lantern/java/index.live.php like you did to request java in the first place. Then at the bottom of the page (if you have java enabled) there will be a new interface to upload and deploy your .war files. Please be aware that this system is still in testing and for now the deployment may take several hours to complete, but once the system is more fully tested we expect the deployment time to decrease considerably. Let us know if you have any questions.

In a few minutes we're going to open free signups on our newest server: Ricky. This server has had new hardware installed and has been completely rebuilt from the ground up to be better and faster. Ricky is a production style server so we're going to strive to keep his load low and his uptime high. Unlike Tommy and Johnny, Ricky is not going to support Java, ASP.NET or Ruby on Rails. Those services are very resource intensive and tend to cause high load. Ricky will however support Python, Django, and Flask. Unlike Tommy Ricky will provide Django and Flask on Python 2.7. Since we can only install Django and Flask on one version of Python per server we decided to have Django/Flask on python 3.6 on Tommy, and Django/Flask on python 2.7 on Ricky. This way you can use django and flask regardless of which major version of python you write in just by choosing the appropriate server. Ricky also supports php 5.4, 5.5, 5.6, 7.0 and 7.1 just like Tommy. On Ricky you can write cgi scripts in perl, ptyhon, or ruby. Ricky has mysql, postgresql, and sqlite depending on what database solution you need. As with all of our servers you can use FTP, SFTP, Webdav, email, cron, etc. Let us know if you have any specific questions about Ricky, or if you're interested in transfering your existing account to Ricky.

We finished August financially strong, and it looks like we made $33.23 over the cost of running our servers. In July we gained $18.62. That may not sound like a lot, but it's a small victory for us and a strong indication that we're heading in the right direction. Since April of this year we've been making these news posts every couple months to let you all know how we've been doing. In 2015 we lost almost $2,500 dollars, and in 2016 despite a strong December we still lost almost $5,000. So, the fact that we're positive at all, even if it's a small amount, is a great relief to us. Breaking even means we'll be able to continue providing our free hosting to tens of thousands of happy users worldwide. Positive means we can expand and upgrade our servers. We're hoping to release our newest server, Ricky, in the next week or so, and we have another server after that on the horizon too. As long as we stay positive like this we can use the extra money to buy more servers, and upgrade our existing ones. Donations are the best way to help support us, but we understand that not everyone can give us money. We're a free hosting service so the majority of our users found us because they can't pay for their hosting. Just because you can't send us any monetary support doesn't mean you can't help out though. We've released a new subforum on HelioNet full of ideas of ways you can help us out, most of which are completely free. You can find it at https://www.helionet.org/index/forum/92-how-you-can-help/ If you have any ideas of ways that people can help us out feel free to make a post in that section to let everyone know. If you do one of the things listed to help us out we'd love to hear about it. You can let us know by replying to the topic. Thanks for doing your part to make HelioHost the best hosting service in the world!

HelioHost has installed Python 2.7.13 on the Johnny server located at #!/usr/bin/python2.7 Between all of our servers we now offer Python 2.6.6, 2.7.5, 2.7.13, 3.6.0, and 3.6.1. If you need any other versions of Python installed or need a module installed on a particular version of Python just let us know and we can probably get it done for you. Python is one of our most popular features and we're happy to provide this service to thousands of our users.

The scheduled maintenance on Johnny is almost complete, and we are proud to announce that php mbstring functions such as mb_strlen() are now enabled on Johnny. Now that the maintenance is done the uptime should improve, and the load spikes should subside. Also, new account creations should speed up considerably and get caught up soon. Thanks for being a member of the HelioHost community.

PHP on Johnny is executing again like it should be instead of downloading. The scheduled maintenance should hopefully be complete soon as well. Thank you for your patience during this process.

It looks like there was a problem with the scheduled maintenance on Johnny last night and PHP has begun downloading files instead of executing. We'll get it fixed as soon as possible. This doesn't affect users on Tommy in any way. Thank you for your patience during this scheduled maintenance.

We will be performing scheduled maintenance starting later this afternoon and running through the night to recompile apache, php, tomcat, and mono on Johnny. The main objective is to re-enable the php mbstring functions. We will also see if we can get asp.net working on Johnny again. This maintenance period is expected to take about 24 hours to complete. During the maintenance you can expect to see more high load spikes and downtime than usual. New account creation will also proceed much slower than usual. Thank you for your patience during this scheduled maintenance.

HelioHost is proud to announce that we now offer HTTP/2 on our Tommy server. A lot of paid hosts don't even offer this latest web protocol yet, but you can get it for free on your website from us. The first version of HTTP was standardized in the late 80s. Then it wasn't until 1997 that it was updated to HTTP/1.1. Over the last decade or so people have been realizing that version 1.1 has a lot of issues especially when it comes to encryption. Google took the initiative and invented their own protocol called SPDY, which is pronounced speedy, to help with some of the issues. HTTP/2 is based on a lot of the innovations of SPDY, and is designed to make the internet faster. HTTP/2 can help you, as a website owner, to provide a faster, more optimized website data to people who access your site with very little effort on your part. In fact all you need to do is create an account on Tommy. Within a few hours the AutoSSL on Tommy will set you up with an encrypted https connection to your site automatically. From then on anyone who visits your site from a modern browser that supports HTTP/2 protocol will use it. You can test to make sure your site is working properly with this tool https://tools.keycdn.com/http2-test For multiple reasons we don't currently have any plans to enable HTTP/2 on Johnny. Mainly because Johnny is our experimental server and encounters high load frequently. HTTP/2 won't help enough to make a noticeable difference in speed on Johnny when the load is that high. If you want to experiment with HTTP/2 you'll need to make your account on Tommy for now. We plan on having HTTP/2 on Ricky too when we get that server online, and functional in the next month or so. Let us know if you have any questions, or need any help getting your site up and running on HTTP/2.

Apache Tomcat on Tommy has been reset because the configuration has become corrupted. Java access has been reset, and all .war files have been undeployed. Everyone will need to request java access again, and post a new .war file deployment request. Sorry for the inconvenience.

The compilation of apache and php on Johnny has completed and we're happy to announce that the php mysqli functions are now working again. As always if you need anything installed or upgraded make a suggestion by posting on our support forums at https://www.helionet.org/ and we'll see if it's possible to fulfill your request. The account creation on Johnny is now caught up, and should be creating new accounts at a normal rate. Thank you for your patience during this scheduled maintenance.

The scheduled maintenance for Johnny has begun. There will be periods of high load and downtime sporadically for a while until we get done recompiling apache/php on Johnny. We hope to fix the php mysqli functions and asp.net mono functionality. Thank you for your patience during this period of high load.

Due to the high load and downtime over the last 24 hours Johnny is quite behind on creating new accounts. We have gotten the account creation process started again and progress is being made on the queue. We've also noticed that mysqli on Johnny isn't currently working. We recommend using mysql instead until we can get it fixed. Johnny's .net 3.5 is also down for the time being. We will need to perform scheduled maintenance on Johnny in the next few days to fix those issues which will result in some more high load and sporadic downtime. Let us know if you find anything else that isn't working as expected. We're going to let Johnny get caught up on account creations first before we do any work though. Since Johnny has been having more issues than usual we are going to double the number of free Tommy signups per day soon. Some free Tommy accounts will become available shortly after this message is posted, and tonight at midnight UTC double the number of free accounts will be available. As always if you don't want to wait until midnight UTC or aren't fast enough to get one of the limited free accounts you can also use https://www.heliohost.org/tommy/ to create your account whenever you want. You can also use http://wiki.helionet.org/Moving_your_account to move your existing Johnny account to Tommy. Let us know if you have any questions or need help with anything.