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badrihippo

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Everything posted by badrihippo

  1. badrihippo

    Domain Cleanup

    Hi! These domains have always annoyed me. You can delete all the *.hippo.heliohost.org domains from my account, since I'm using custom domains anyway (sssnet.tk, and sometimes subdomains of snipettemag.com)
  2. Thanks for the detailed breakdown! This makes a lot of sense; I didn't consider the "sharing/using it at the same time" aspect of it before. I just went back and re-read your original post too; there's quite an interplay between memory and storage here! First the storage was slow, so it was being offloaded to the memory to keep things running; now the memory is running out which means it may have to be swapped to the storage. Must be quite a balancing act to decide how much of which resources to upgrade. About the usage of CPU vs. memory, I can see that play out for myself too: most of the processes I have running there don't consume much CPU except for short periods while working, but the memory usage is constant.
  3. Oh, so it's more of a "we have less of it so use it sparingly" thing than a "that's just how much it costs" thing?
  4. Hi! In case this is helpful, I recently made successful payments with my international debit card. Putting notes here for reference, both for myself and if it helps you. TL;DR: Braintree might be worth a shot? (They're owned by PayPal, so whatever data you're giving them, they already have). In the past few months, I've made payments from India at the following places: GoFundMe - gofundme.com Kobo US - us.kobobooks.com Mozilla - donate.mozilla.org Mailgun - a bill from mailgun.com Note that this was with an international debit card. Local debit cards won't work, but at least my international one worked flawlessly. (It's still at a roadblock with Stripe and PayPal). I tried to figure out what payment gateways they used for collecting my card details, and here's what I got: I couldn't make out what GoFundMe uses; in their privacy policy they say they use different processor depending on the country Kobo was similarly opaque but IIRC they use Citrus Pay (I placed an order with them yesterday) Mozilla uses Braintree (a PayPal company but evidently with better payment processing than PayPal itself) Mailgun uses something called "chargifypay.com", but when I try to load that page it redirects me to a complicated billing/SaaS provider called Maxio. Looks like there was a separate billing management service called Chargify that has now been bought over. I was hoping for more details but that's unfortunately all I could find. If it's worth it, let me know and maybe I'll have a shot at writing to those companies and asking them directly what payment processor they use.
  5. By the way, I've noticed the price jump is significantly more when upgrading RAM than it is for storage or even CPU upgrades. Is this because CPUs scale better but RAM has to be added linearly each time, or something? (Just trying to understand how this works; it's a pattern I've noticed in other hosting providers too)
  6. It was an fsck issue; Krydos is resolving it on Discord. Not directly related to the DDoS though it could have been triggered by it! Thanks Krydos, and mods please mark this topic closed
  7. Thanks for the heads-up! I'll run an analysis and see how much RAM my server is using; my guess is my team will choose to keep it for the upgraded amount since we can afford it at least for now.
  8. I just read something about a DDoS attack on Discord. I guess that's what must have triggered all this. Take your time then; I'll check back in a few hours and see if things have stabilised. To add more information: when I try to SSH in I get the error, ssh: connect to host members.snipettemag.com port [REDACTED]: Network is unreachable curl on the other hand seems to be trying and then timing out, curl: (7) Failed to connect to members.snipettemag.com port 80 after 394 ms: Connection refused So (from my limited knowledge) I guess it could be some kind of DDoS-triggered network failure?
  9. Hi, I woke up this morning to find that my VPS had a "read-only filesystem". I tried rebooting (shutdown -r now) to see if it solved the issue, but now it's gone mostly unresponsive: I can ping it, but can't load pages or SSH in. Could you check the status and restore the system? Domain: members.snipettemag.com (or hippo2.heliohost.org) IP address: 64.71.156.101 I'm using a custom SSH port which I don't want to post in public; if you let me know where to send it I can give it to you. I see other people have had similar problems (and I have, too, once) so I'm guessing this is a quick thing to solve? I don't remember what exactly happened last time, but I think it was essentially running fsck and then booting again. There are a few services to be started after boot, but if you get it to where I can SSH in, I can take it from there. Thanks, Badri
  10. I've been logging into my account to keep the site active, but I might have missed a date or logged in at the wrong place. When I load my website (sssnet.tk) it shows an "Ahoy there" queued account message. The HTTPS version of the site shows an "SSL not set up properly" message instead. The confusing part is that my main domain, hippo.heliohost.org doesn't show any of these errors. Instead, it show Apache's "Testing 123" landing page, which makes sense because I haven't really placed anything on the main domain. I tried logging into Plesk, and that happened smoothly with no indication of a deactivated account. However, when I tried to renew the SSL certificate for sssnet.tk, it was unable to do so, because .well-known/... is also being redirected to the same generic page. Could you reactivate my account, if that's what the problem is? And if not, perhaps something else is wrong in the setup?
  11. Sorry for the late reply! I should check this forum more often. Ouch, PayTM really doesn't like other countries then. It is optimised for India so I guess the idea is only to support Indian businesses? PayU seems more international but since they're also India based it's likely they'll be the same. (I couldn't find any evidence to the contrary). I've never used Payoneer, and their documentation about available payment methods seems quite opaque. They mention "linking" an account which is bad news for anyone from India since India no longer allows linking. But if you set up a test payment I'm willing to give it a try (if it goes through you can extend my VPS or something). I was trying to research more on payment options, but unfortunately most people are talking about getting payments from the US to India, which is annoying. I guess Indians are more focused on getting US dollars than on paying for US services >.<
  12. Oh okay great! I guess this is a workable solution for now (unless I change the PayPal account I pay from). Yes, PayTM would be great, if you can manage it! It's got good support in India (as does any app supporting India's Unified Payment Interface or UPI). Another potential option is PayU, which I personally use, and which has competent customer support staff who actually have the authority to make changes rather than stonewalling. I'm not sure if it works for people based outside India, but if PayTM doesn't work it's worth looking into. (Customer service is a big problem here even with major companies; for example I contacted Western Union about activating my account dozens of times within the span of a month before giving up; they didn't seem to be able to review the documents they themselves had asked for and allow me to use their own platform. Anyway, that's something I won't go into now...)
  13. Hi there, My VPS expires in a few weeks, and because recurring payments aren't working from India I've been having to make one-time payments. My friend just sent the last payment of $21.60 on October 5th (two days ago); could you confirm that it's arrived and extend my subscription for another 6 months? Server: hippo2.heliohost.org (also members.snipettemag.com) IP: 64.71.156.101 PayPal payment ID: 81X39290UA608530J from Manasa Kashi (she also sent an email to Krydos, but perhaps it was the wrong one...) *** More generally, it looks like recurring payments aren't going to happen for a while, due to changing government regulations in India and PayPal's glitches (incompetence?). Given that, would it be more convenient to do a large one-time payment (say, for 2-3 years) instead of every 6 months? (I know the automated system only supports 6-month increments, so it depends on how the manual override works; there was a glitch once where the VPS expired prematurely and was manually extended). I'm fine either way, but longer-term payments might be less work for you on your end, so let me know which you prefer for next time onwards!
  14. Another clarification: do I have to log into the HelioHost control panel (https://heliohost.org/login as @balloons mentioned above), or Plesk directly (eg. https://tommy2.heliohost.org)? Or do both options work?
  15. Hi! I'm currently using a HelioHost VPS, and have generated a couple of large (~2-3 GB) backup files just in case. I want to download them to my local system, but since the speed is coming to about ~100 kbps, I was wondering if such a large download would affect the rest of the HelioHost network? Should I inform someone in advance or is there a best (eg. low-traffic) time to do this? I'm fine with the low download speed; just wanted to make sure it's not affecting anyone else.
  16. Awesome! Looking forward to Plesk and Morty too (well I'm not going to use them since I have a VPS, but still feels good to know it's there 😁). My VPS had become pretty slow during March/April but now it's back to normal, so I guess this reinforces that stable feeling. My team has been hosting our main website on Netlify till now, and we're planning to switch to a full-fledged Ghost on a HelioHost VPS, so the timing couldn't have been better 🙃 Re the reboot: nginx and some other services failed to start for some reason, so I had to SSH in manually and start them. In case anyone else ran into problems, the solution is to run `systemctl status service` and then `systemctl restart service` where service is the service name, such an nginx (web server), mysql (database), postfix (email sender), dovecot (email receiver), etc. Of course Hestia might handle all this by itself; I'm not sure (I use YunoHost) 🙂
  17. I haven't used Hestia, but from what I can make out, there's a cron job that automatically tries to run `v-update-system-hestia-all` every so often. I'm guessing it's some sort of auto-update command for Hestia. If it's timing it out means Hestia wasn't able to auto-update but I'm not sure why that could be. Does Hestia have a manual "check for updates" options somewhere? If so, you could try running it and see what kind of error it gives (if any). Not sure about avstats (or did you mean awstats?) because I haven't used it. What is a download list, exactly?
  18. We aren't switching the hosting company exactly, but cPanel revoked all our licenses without warning so the control panel has to be moved over to Plesk instead. Until this happens, nobody will be able to sign up or access their existing account, and the free websites will go down for sometime in the middle while the switchover is happening (this could take weeks because HelioHost's scripts are very tightly integrated with cPanel and a lot of them will have to be rewritten to work with Plesk). You can find the full story here: Later updates will be coming on the News channel: https://www.helionet.org/index/forum/1-news/ Unfortunately, until the switchover happens, you won't be able to sign up for a free account. You can still sign up for a paid VPS since those don't use cPanel and aren't affected by this sudden change. When the switchover is complete HelioHost will probably keep free signups suspended for a little while to make sure existing users have their setup running smoothly and then open up again for free signups. (By the way, I'm not sure what you can do about your display name but one of the mods can probably help you with that).
  19. Awesome! Great to hear and glad I could help 🙂
  20. No problem! If your provider asked for two DNS servers I suspect you'll have to go for my backup option: managing DNS externally using a service like ClouDNS to register A records, then adding the domains to Hestia to use them. (Even before Hestia is set up, you'll know the DNS is working because you'll be able to SSH in using ...@yourdomain.lu instead of ...@some-ip-address). You're right, though, Krydos might have some better ideas...
  21. That isn't what I had in mind, but I went through the Hestia docs just now and realised what you're proposing is a better solution. Sorry about that. Some explanation is probably necessary here. Explanation of how the DNS system works I should probably start by saying I'm not completely sure of the nuances of the system either, but I have messed around with DNSes quite a bit. What follows is my understanding plus a few educated guesses and some StackOverflow searches. If everything goes smoothly, you may not need to know all this, but when I got stuck (which was not uncommon) it helped me to know all this and have some idea of what was going on! There are three components to this: Your registrar, which points the domain to a nameserver. For example, I have snipettemag.com pointing to the nsone.com nameserver, which is what I use. So if anyone wants to load snipettemag.com or its subdomains, they're told to look it up at the nsone nameserver. Your nameserver, which actually manages the domains, subdomains, etc. and redirects them to the respective machines. For example, snipettemag.com points to a Netlify server but stats.snipettemag.com points to my VPS and media.snipettemag.com was until recently pointing to Tommy, where I was storing images and other static files. The actual server (VPS, Tommy, etc) which receives the requests and responds appropriately. For example, my VPS is set up so that stats.snipettemag.com serves a local GoatCounter installation I have, whereas bag.snipettemag.com redirects to my Wallabag. Both requests come to my VPS, but the VPS responds differently based on whether the request is to the "stats" or "bag" subdomain. You wouldn't have seen these moving parts on Tommy, because HelioHost runs the nameserver as well as Tommy, so the two are well integrated. When you add a domain (or subdomain) to Tommy, it automatically creates the corresponding DNS record as well. On other setups (such as mine) it's more common to run the server by oneself but delegate the nameserver to some other provider. The reason is that if your VPS crashes, the nameserver will go down as well, which means any other domains it serves (eg. email or an external subdomain) will go down as well. The downside is of course that you have to register domains twice: once on the nameserver end, and once again on the server (think one to send and one to receive). This setup is what I was trying to suggest for you as well. My recommendation for you But now I realise that Hestia has a DNS management facility. If you're just going to be hosting one domain, and Hestia handles it without much advanced setup, then maybe that's a better option for you. In which case the answer to the first part of your question is yes: your VPS is the "real nameserver". The problem is, you'll have to point to it using an NS record, which StackOverflow tells me needs a domain name (not an IP address). I think you can solve this problem by registering two records at your provider's end: an NS record pointing [yourdomain.lu] to [ns.yourdomain.lu] an A record pointing [ns.yourdomain.lu] to [your VPS IP address] That way you theoretically have two servers—the nameserver ns.yourdomain.lu and the actual yourdomain.lu—which makes the DNS system happy even though they're physically on the same machine. This is assuming your provider allows you to add both NS and A records. (If not, you'd have to go for a separate nameserver like ClouDNS, and update the records there as well as in Hestia every time you want to change something—which is hopefully not often). I'd like to signoff by saying that I've never used this kind of setup, although it's what I think would work best for you. I'd suggest you give it a try. If it works, then great; if not, I can't help you, but I'd be happy to help out with setting up an external nameserver like I mentioned in the last line or perhaps someone who's more knowledgeable than me could step in 🙂
  22. What domain are you using: is it a HelioHost-provided domain or your own one? If it's your own then you don't have to wait for HelioHost to delete the Tommy DNS records: you can just change the settings at your DNS provider's dashboard. For example, I got my domain "sssnet.tk" on Freenom so I can log in to Freenom's control panel and change the domain settings there. Just create an A record pointing sssnet.tk (for example) to your VPS's IP address (which you should have got in an email from Krydos once it was created). If the DNS record is pointing directly to your server, then any obsolete HelioHost records will be bypassed because requests will go directly from your new record to your VPS. The basic DNS record types, which are available at most providers, should work for you. But if at some point you want more advanced DNS records (say, for an XMPP server) then you could sign up for a dedicated DNS host such as the freemium ClouDNS. Security is a much more complicated business: I use YunoHost instead of a control panel, which automatically installs firewalls and monitors like fail2ban. I'm not sure if Hestia has its own security in place, but one thing you could do is change your SSH port to a non-standard one. I used to get a lot of random people trying to log on to my VPS on port 22, and now that I've changed the SSH port it doesn't happen any more. But I'd suggest you play around with the server a bit and become more familiar with it before you try this 🙂
  23. One more from Tamil Nadu, India, Asia 🌏
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