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HelioHost General Overview |
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| HelioHost | |
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| Company Name | Helio Networks |
| Company Type | 501(c)(3) Nonprofit |
| Foundation | 2nd of March, 2005 |
| Founder | Ashoat Tevosyan |
| Location | Seattle, Washington, USA |
| Industry | Web hosting service |
| Number of Users | 10,000+[1] |
| Website | https://www.heliohost.org/ |
HelioHost is a community-powered web hosting service founded in 2005 and based in the United States of America. Reliant primarily on donations and revenue raised from ads on support and account administration pages, HelioHost do not offer a paid hosting option and aim to offer a larger range of software options to users than free services offered by commercial web hosts. HelioHost serves over 10,000 users as of 2018.[1]
HelioHost was founded by Ashoat Tevosyan on the Second of March, 2005, shortly after the "HelioNet" forums that continue to offer user support. From its inception it has aimed to be community run and financed, and while Tevosyan no longer maintains an active role in HelioHost's operation, a group of primarily volunteer administrators continue to maintain the service and support forums.
The service originally limited the storage space and bandwidth available to users based on their activity in the HelioNet web forums, measured in credits called "Helions". Alternatively, users could install advertisments for HelioHost on their pages.[2] This approach was later abandoned in preference to the current funding model, which is intended to be less frustrating to users.[1]
HelioHost achieved official 501(c)(3) not-for-profit status in 2017[1], while the service was recovering from a severe hardware failure that rendered the popular "Stevie" server (the first dedicated server purchased by the organisation) inoperable in late 2016. Two replacement servers, "Tommy" and "Ricky", were brought online later in the year using new hardware.[3][4] These continue to operate alongside the less stable "Johnny" server which is intended mainly for users testing web content for later use on a more reliable platform.
All of HelioHost's public web servers allow a limited number of new accounts to be created per day, with some exceptions allowed for donors. Only one account on any of the servers is allowed per user, with which they are granted 1GB storage space as well as unlimited bandwidth, email accounts, and use of a wide variety of installed server software. Such software includes scripting languages PHP, Python, Java/JSP, ASP.NET, Ruby, Django, Perl, and databases MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite.[5][1]
Administration is achieved using cPanel, where traffic analysis is provided by popular packages Analog Stats, AWstats, and Webalizer. Currently all servers run Linux operating systems. No terminal access is permitted for manual configuration, however FTP, SFTP, and FTPS access to the user's home directory is provided, and further accounts can be configured using the cPanel interface. A maximum of two Cron jobs may be configured, in cPanel, to be run within a 24 hour period.
Users may register unlimited top level domains and subdomains with their account.[5][6] At sign-up, users are provided with a default domain in the form: "[custom].heliohost.org". SSL certificates are automatically configured using Let's Encrypt.[7]
Accounts expire if their cPanel administration pages are not accessed within a period of thirty days. This prevents page content from being displayed, but all user data is retained until the allocated storage space becomes full. Users are limited to 1GB storage, but increased space is sometimes available to donors upon request. Accounts may also be suspended due to excessive system resource usage, or if they are found to be using the service for spam or illegal activities. Users found to have registered more than one account are given the opportunity to choose which account they wish to keep while others are deleted by the administrators. Accounts are forbidden from sending more than fifty emails per day without explicit permission. No more than two Cron jobs are allowed to be run within a 24 hour period.
Some scripting functions that could compromise server stability, or user security, are disabled.[8]