HelioHostReviews of heliohost.org

Response from HelioHostMay 26, 2026

Thanks for taking the time to leave a review, Julien. * Regarding the need to login each month: It's really a balancing act. If we allow too many inactive accounts to pile up, for instance if we only required a login every 6 months, we won't have room for any new accounts and we would have to close signups entirely for months or years at a time until some space cleared up. We have heard this same complaint about needing to keep your account active though, so that's why we released a new server called Morty that doesn't require logins to stay active. We have quite a few people who signed up for Morty in 2024 and haven't logged in a single time since then. * Regarding the inability to add domains on your own: The biggest issue with self-service domain adding is our ancient DNS system that was last updated in 2017 or something crazy. Well, the bad news is that ancient DNS server finally crashed a few weeks ago, but the good news is that ancient DNS system finally crashed which is forcing up to set up a new DNS system. Now that we have a new DNS system in place we are one step closer to allowing you to add domains on your own without contacting support. Progress is being made! If you want to try out Morty for free for a while we can give you a free trial. Let us know if you have any questions or need help with anything.

Response from HelioHostApr 12, 2026

Thanks for taking the time to leave a review, Oleg. We're happy to hear that you think our hosting service is really good. What do you think we should do to make our service really great? Hopefully your feedback will allow us to make improvements so you can turn this review into a 5 star review. Thanks in advance.

Response from HelioHostMar 24, 2026

Thanks for taking the time to leave a review, Deveshk. I'm sorry to hear about experiencing downtime on your current plan, and it slowing down your work. You may be interested to know that we have a Morty plan that has 100% uptime, and is much faster than your current plan. You're welcome to to try out the Morty plan for free if you're interested. If the Morty plan satisfies your uptime requirements you could update this review to a 5 star. Let us know if you're interested.

Response from HelioHostMar 17, 2026

Thanks for taking the time to leave a review, Ateusnet. I took a look at your account and noticed that you're using Wordpress with a lot of weird junk and strange filenames. Having a lot of randomly named files is a pretty common sign that your Wordpress has been hacked, which could explain the slowness. Let us know if you need help checking the integrity of your software. We've also had a few other people complain about Wordpress being slow on the shared hosting. One guy upgraded to a VPS and had to have 8 GB of dedicated memory before Wordpress didn't feel slow. It's insane how bloated that software is. We have a whole wiki page dedicated to how bad it is if you're curious about it. https://wiki.helionet.org/WordPress We would love to know what we could do to earn that last star though. We consider anything less than a 5 star review a failure. Let us know how we can help.

Response from HelioHostFeb 4, 2026

Thanks for taking the time to leave a review, Multiggg. It looks like you created your account in 2018. Thanks for sticking with us for all of these years. We would love to know what we could do to earn that last star though. We consider anything less than a 5 star review a failure. Let us know if you need help with anything.

Response from HelioHostJan 1, 2026

Thanks for the review, Denisov. We appreciate you using our free hosting since 2017. Sorry you keep getting 403 errors on your website. Your website works for everyone else and we don't see 403 errors so it must be something related to your browser or your internet connection. Hopefully we can figure out what is going on and you can bump this review up to a 5 star soon. Say "hi" to Byron for us.

Response from HelioHostAug 30, 2025

Thanks for the review, Shehabalsaidi. We would love to know what we can improve to get this review upgraded to a 5 star. You mentioned "more powerful options with suitable price so for advanced users" which sounds really exciting. We have one customer who has a WooCommerce site with over 100k items for sale in the database, and about 500k page hits per day. We got them set up on a VPS, and provided free database tuning, cache tuning, and hardware adjustments to squeeze as much performance out of the cheapest price we could give him. He now pays less than half of what he was paying wpengine.com and a has a much faster website too. I would say that the situation described above would count as "more powerful options with suitable price so for advanced users" but if you have something else in mind we would love to hear about it too.

Response from HelioHostMay 1, 2025

Thanks for the honest review. Yeah, Johnny is pretty great for free, but you're right about the uptime and speed is not the best. Currently about 97-98%. The only real way to improve the uptime is to close signups and delete a couple hundred free accounts. Since our mission as a non-profit is to provide free hosting it seems counter productive to close free signups and kick people off our service. If people need better uptime, and faster websites we do have the new Morty plan that you can upgrade to for only $1 per month. We also just finished a fundraiser to buy a new server, and we're going to be releasing a new free plan named Ricky soon that provides Java and JSP hosting.