[deanhills]

OK.  So I tried to sign up for a hosting account with HelioHost.  And this was my not so good experience.

First you click on sign up expecting to sign up for an account with HelioHost.  So instead they ask you to input your e-mail address.  After that they ask you to verify your e-mail address.  The verification link was received very fast, but after that the experience became weird by normal free hosting account signup experience.  They ask you to tick a bunch of attributes you want to have for your hosting account.  You then have to click on a "compare" link - the next step - and it then lists the availability of the attributes in the three servers called Ricky Johnny and Tommy.   It then said that Tommy was the most suitable for the attributes I ticked but that all three servers were full and that I should try again in 1 hour and 47 minutes. The print screen below is after I had refreshed the page a few minutes after:   



I find it a bit arrogant that the owner of HelioHost should think I'm so hard up for HelioHost hosting that I will now keep their page open on my desktop and refresh it every now and then but OK for the purpose of a review of my experience I did just that.  Periodically refreshed the page.  And guess what came up after that long wait:



Haha!  No way.  In the meanwhile the whole Website and Community Forum are dotted with DONATE buttons and advertisements like literally rubbing it under one's nose.  Why would I want to donate anything to a service that I didn't get and the experience I went through above.   Wow!  Not sure what games are being played with the above verification and listing experience - referring to the waiting times given - but I find all of it not such a good experience.  Definitely not worthy of a Donation.

[tiwil]

OK.  So I tried to sign up for a hosting account with HelioHost.  And this was my not so good experience.

First you click on sign up expecting to sign up for an account with HelioHost.  So they ask you to input your e-mail address.  After that they ask you to verify your e-mail address.  The verification link was received very fast, but after that the experience became weird by normal free hosting account signup experience.  They ask you to tick a bunch of attributes you want to have for your hosting account.  I ticked almost all of them.  You then have to click on a "compare" link - the next step - and it then lists the availability of the attributes in the three servers called Ricky Johnny and Tommy.   It then said that Tommy was the most suitable but that all three servers were full and that I should try again in 1 hour and 47 minutes. The print screen below is after I had refreshed the page a few minutes after:   



I find it a bit arrogant that the owner of HelioHost should think I'm so hard up for HelioHost hosting that I will now keep their page open on my desktop and refresh it every now and then but OK for the purpose of a review of my experience I did just that.  Periodically refreshed the page.  And guess what came up after that long wait:



Haha!  No way.  In the meanwhile the whole Website and Community Forum are dotted with DONATE buttons and advertisements like literally rubbing it under my nose.  Why would I want to donate anything to a service that I didn't get and the experience I went through above.  Wow!  Not sure what games are being played with the above verification and listing experience - referring to the waiting times given - but I find all of it not such a good experience.  Definitely not worthy of a Donation.

AFAIK, Heliohost only open new account registration once in a day at a fixed time. You can register for Johnny at any time but the performance is very bad because every user can register for it. Tommy server is "good" because it's "limited edition" so not so much users can get it. Sometimes Tommy registration only live for less than a minute. You have to be fast.

You can watch the server uptime from http://heliohost.grd.net.pl/monitor/. It's should be up to date. You can also see that Tommy have no new free account registration for today. Only Ricky and Johnny have. Even in Ricky it's limited too.

[deanhills]

@tiwil  My complaint is about wasting my time with the above "refresh page" and notifications about time that should be waited as basically they are not true any way.  Why not just do as all free hosts do.  You sign up for an account.  One then applies for a hosting account.  And then HelioHost can write an e-mail - or even do an automated e-mail with Johnny is available.  Tommy is not.  If I want I can sign up with Johnny (they provide a sign up link).  And if I prefer to wait for Tommy provide a link in the e-mail for being put on a waiting list. Simple and user friendly.

[deanhills]

OK.  Now this has been a different experience.  I followed the "johnny application" link.  And I had a hosting account within 30 minutes or so.  I was delightfully surprised.  Johnny  has a genuine up to date cpanel with a softaculous app. I also got a sub-domain.  Hmmm  maybe there is still something worth experiencing here.  I'll report back in the next few days after I've given Johnny's cpanel a good workout.

[tiwil]

@tiwil  My complaint is about wasting my time with the above "refresh page" and notifications about time that should be waited as basically they are not true any way.  Why not just do as all free hosts do.  You sign up for an account.  One then applies for a hosting account.  And then HelioHost can write an e-mail - or even do an automated e-mail with Johnny is available.  Tommy is not.  If I want I can sign up with Johnny (they provide a sign up link).  And if I prefer to wait for Tommy provide a link in the e-mail for being put on a waiting list.  Simple and user friendly.

To be honest it's about supply and demand chain. Heliohost is very (well this is relative) popular among free web hosting. In fact their Tommy server is always full because of this. The demand for Tommy is very high but the supply is low. With this kind of situation it is not worth it for them to automatically send email for the waiting user. Even if they lose you, they still have other people waiting to use their web hosting. This is not a very good strategy because they also need money from donation but that's the reality.

Also if they do waiting list, you probably now in 1000th . So many users want to get to Tommy too.
I like the current condition(?) where you have to compete with other at a very small time to get the account.

[mzltest]

OK.  So I tried to sign up for a hosting account with HelioHost.  And this was my not so good experience.

First you click on sign up expecting to sign up for an account with HelioHost.  So instead they ask you to input your e-mail address.  After that they ask you to verify your e-mail address.  The verification link was received very fast, but after that the experience became weird by normal free hosting account signup experience.  They ask you to tick a bunch of attributes you want to have for your hosting account.  You then have to click on a "compare" link - the next step - and it then lists the availability of the attributes in the three servers called Ricky Johnny and Tommy.   It then said that Tommy was the most suitable for the attributes I ticked but that all three servers were full and that I should try again in 1 hour and 47 minutes. The print screen below is after I had refreshed the page a few minutes after:   



I find it a bit arrogant that the owner of HelioHost should think I'm so hard up for HelioHost hosting that I will now keep their page open on my desktop and refresh it every now and then but OK for the purpose of a review of my experience I did just that.  Periodically refreshed the page.  And guess what came up after that long wait:



Haha!  No way.  In the meanwhile the whole Website and Community Forum are dotted with DONATE buttons and advertisements like literally rubbing it under one's nose.  Why would I want to donate anything to a service that I didn't get and the experience I went through above.   Wow!  Not sure what games are being played with the above verification and listing experience - referring to the waiting times given - but I find all of it not such a good experience.  Definitely not worthy of a Donation.  :rolleyes:

I tried just now and my attempt was sucessful.It might because I previously created an account with them but has been inactive too long(they still reserved my account?).According to my memory,they do only give 100 hosting accounts a day.

And yes,the cpanel includes a bunch of ads.I even doubt that I am browsing cpanel interface rather than Vpanel(by byethost.Resellers often insert ads into them).
A cpanel full-length overview on my phone:
*Please note that I used a free version of imagekit to host these images as Postimage have a resolution limit.Monthly B/W limit is 20GB for my plan.




For someone who want to examine a sample website:

For speed comparsion :
**preparing to reapply for Tommy**
(*They say they are still configuring my website so it takes some time before it actually works)
compare with:
mazelong.gigapages.net/
*They are mirror sites.The heliohost one is imported from my recent(yesterday) backup.
My test projects are also available to compare:
/test2/test.html (Uses IBM translation API)
/test3/file.html (uses imagekit API.My early version for mzltest.webo.page/ .)



Finally,based on my early experience:
- Host-ed once offered cpanel free hosting,but they seems to reject new applications.(their homepage still says they offer this service,but actually they no longer approve the applications).They offer no support,and they will cancel your hosting plan when you submit a ticket(hey!they say free users can only use ticket system)

- Googiehost say they offer cpanel free hosting,too.But I never got approved.If someone got approved please let me know.

- FreeHosting.com says they offer free cpanel hosting.But they require a domain and free TLDs are not accepted.No SSL support.

[deanhills]

Thanks for the detailed response @mzltest. I've moved it to our separate thread on HelioHost. Otherwise it would be going off topic.

My view of HelioHost is getting more positive after my earlier not so good experience with signing up. The cpanel that comes with Johnny is very up to date and in my opinion even better than what Gigarocket's was - for now any way. I'm not too crazy about the ads, but if it's paying for an up to date and state of the art cpanel - the real cpanel, then OK. I'm happy with that. And to be honest, except for a slight blip when things slowed down a little, in general Johnny is not that slow.

In the end I seemed to have received a free hosting account with 1 GB disk space and unlimited most of everything else. I haven't done much yet, but the little I've done has given me confidence that this cpanel is for real. For example I checked Softaculous and noticed that the latest version of all software packages are available. So looks like the Admin are updating softaculous and if they are doing that, they must be very much hands on in the WHM.

It's just the first experiences with those strange Web notifications about waiting for Tommy and not getting Tommy that wasn't that user-friendly. But maybe it's a good thing in a way. Only someone who is serious will keep on trying.

@tiwil You're right. it's a supply and demand thing. But have you tried Johnny lately? It was definitely not slow. Like there was a blimp only for 5 minutes or so, but in overall speed was completely acceptable to me. Maybe there are less active users than there usually are.

I'll report back later after I've given the cpanel a greater workout.

[mzltest]

Thanks for the detailed response @mzltest.  I've moved it to our separate thread on HelioHost.  Otherwise it would be going off topic.

My view of HelioHost is getting more positive after my earlier not so good experience with signing up.  The cpanel that comes with Johnny is very up to date and in my opinion even better than what Gigarocket's was - for now any way.  I'm not too crazy about the ads, but if it's paying for an up to date and state of the art cpanel - the real cpanel, then OK.  I'm happy with that.  And to be honest, except for a slight blip when things slowed down a little, in general Johnny is not that slow.  

In the end I seemed to have received a free hosting account with 1 GB disk space and unlimited most of everything else.  I haven't done much yet, but the little I've done has given me confidence that this cpanel is for real.  For example I checked Softaculous and noticed that the latest version of all software packages are available.  So looks like the Admin are updating softaculous and if they are doing that, they must be very much hands on in the WHM.

It's just the first experiences with those strange Web notifications about waiting for Tommy and not getting Tommy that wasn't that user-friendly.  But maybe it's a good thing in a way.  Only someone who is serious will keep on trying.  

@tiwil  You're right.  it's a supply and demand thing.  But have you tried Johnny lately?  It was definitely not slow.  Like there was a blimp only for 5 minutes or so, but in overall speed was completely acceptable to me.  Maybe there are less active users than there usually are.  

I'll report back later after I've given the cpanel a greater workout.

Thanks for the move.I didn't notice a thread was opened for heliohost at that time.

Just to add;you need to sign in every month otherwise your account will be deactivated.

It seems they are a P2H in some aspects.From the forum you can see there is a subforum post for free domain applications.You need 400 good posts a year for a year's free domain.But I don't know whether it is still active.
https://www.helionet.org/index/topic/342...getnewpost

It seems they previously accepts mining as a kind of donation.
https://www.helionet.org/index/topic/415...ntry180746

They often have 404 errors on their forums.

For example I checked Softaculous and noticed that the latest version of all software packages are available. 

Yeah.At the last few months for gr's free hosting we used the free version of it.

[deanhills]

Just to add;you need to sign in every month otherwise your account will be deactivated.

 Thanks for the tip.  I've also learned something different after I created a Website last night.  Only after I had gone through the whole procedure and was ready to look at it, HelioHost message below came up.  I've got to wait for 24 hours before the Website will show.  I think that is my most criticism with little things like this that to me is poor communication.  Like no where did I see not logging in once a month will be the end of the hosting account.  For me the rule makes great sense, but the communication of those rules and ways of doing is not so good.

It seems they are a P2H in some aspects.From the forum you can see there is a subforum post for free domain applications.You need 400 good posts a year for a year's free domain.But I don't know whether it is still active.
https://www.helionet.org/index/topic/342...getnewpost

I did notice that.  While I was waiting for the hosting to happen I discovered that I had signed up for the Forum in 2018.  When I tried to create a Forum account it said my e-mail address already existed.  So I was able to get in.  And I was impressed as the Forum is active.  Not very active, but active enough as well as reasonable clean of spam.  And I then finally got it, that once one is on Johnny and have figured out how everything fits together one could ask through the Forum for an upgrade.  And it makes great sense the more active one is in the Forum, and provided one can make a good case for upgraded hosting, the easier it will be to get upgraded hosting.  Not that Johnny is that bad however.  But yes, it does have limitations.

I have a question for you.  I noticed Johnny has 1 GB free space.  When one has upgraded hosting with Tommy, is it still 1 GB free space or more?

[mzltest]

 Thanks for the tip.  I've also learned something different after I created a Website last night.  Only after I had gone through the whole procedure and was ready to look at it, HelioHost message below came up.  I've got to wait for 24 hours before the Website will show.  I think that is my most criticism with little things like this that to me is poor communication.  Like no where did I see not logging in once a month will be the end of the hosting account.  For me the rule makes great sense, but the communication of those rules and ways of doing is not so good.



I did notice that.  While I was waiting for the hosting to happen I discovered that I had signed up for the Forum in 2018.  When I tried to create a Forum account it said my e-mail address already existed.  So I was able to get in.  And I was impressed as the Forum is active.  Not very active, but active enough as well as reasonable clean of spam.  And I then finally got it, that once one is on Johnny and have figured out how everything fits together one could ask through the Forum for an upgrade.  And it makes great sense the more active one is in the Forum, and provided one can make a good case for upgraded hosting, the easier it will be to get upgraded hosting.  Not that Johnny is that bad however.  But yes, it does have limitations.

I have a question for you.  I noticed Johnny has 1 GB free space.  When one has upgraded hosting with Tommy, is it still 1 GB free space or more?

I am not sure,but I think that's likely the same for Tommy as they say

- For every $5 you donate we will increase your storage by 1000 MB to a maximum of 5000 MB.

on their donation pages
So every $5 =1000MB ?
The 1k MB disk quota seems to be universal limit until you donate.