Thursday, November 5, 2026 · Customer reviews of US businesses
The Fair Hearing score
Excellent
118 reviews
HelioHostSelect a line to read only those reviews.
Honesty, pricing, process and quality scores appear once 5 customers have rated them.
We are a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization powered by a community of hobbyists that offer full-featured web hosting services for free.Our mission is to provide high quality web hosting for free to as many people as possible. We believe that everyone should have access to their own website whether they're a student to a small business owner, and everything in between. We're operated by a team of highly experienced volunteers who are passionate about what we do.Many schools around the world don't have the resources to provide their students with an online environment where they can learn to create a website. HelioHost aims to solve this issue by providing free hosting accounts for the teachers and students.Many small businesses can't afford to pay for hosting in order to sell their products online. HelioHost aims to solve this by providing free hosting and low cost hosting to small businesses to allow them to have an online presence.We offer as many free hosting accounts as we can, and we also offer donation based hosting accounts to help offset the cost of providing hosting for free. In addition, we provide affordable VPS hosting plans and scaling pricing based on usage for people who wish to upgrade from the free plans.We encourage community members to help each other, and recruit new volunteers from the community who are the most helpful. We own all of our own hardware so we don't have to resell hosting services from other companies which helps us keep costs low.
HelioHost (heliohost.org) has 118 customer reviews on The Fair Hearing, with an average rating of 4.6 out of 5.
118 approved reviews, newest moderated first
Great volunteers, very helpful.
By Kunde
Response from HelioHost· Aug 1, 2026
Thanks for the 5 star review, Kunde! It's tough to find volunteers that are willing to work for $0.00 per year, but we're really lucky to have a very friendly, helpful team keeping HelioHost running. That's definitely the main reason we've managed to continue providing free hosting for 21 year and counting. Let us know if you need help with anything.
Estoy sumamente satisfecho por el apoyo técnico del equipo de HelioHost, su grado de profesionalidad es admirable y lo es más por el carácter voluntario de su labor, Moodle corre como si hubiera pagado por un servidor caro, gracias nuevamente.
By ernesedu
Response from HelioHost· Jul 26, 2026
Hello Ernesedu, thanks for taking the time to leave a review. It's kind of ironic that you mention old MariaDB version on Tommy, because last night we emailed you about how we're going to be upgrading the MariaDB version on Tommy. EDIT: Now that you're on the new server with MariaDB 12.3 can you install Moodle? EDIT2: I went ahead and installed the latest version of Moodle on your account for you, and it's working fine. We would really appreciate it if you could update this review to reflect the reality of the situation.
Good service
By customer
Response from HelioHost· Jul 26, 2026
Thanks for the 5 star review, Alkastraverse. Let us know if you need help with anything.
Great free service, great people. I higly recomend Heliohost, have gladely donated in the past and will certainly do so in the future!
By customer
Response from HelioHost· Jun 26, 2026
Thanks for the 5 star review, JD. I see your donation to our 2020 fundraiser, and wanted to let you know how much we appreciate your financial support. Without generous donors such as yourself we would have gone out of business years ago. We're planning on having another fundraiser in January 2027 so we'll send you an email when that begins. Let us know if you need help with anything.
I'm using free hosting. 2 things remove one star are : - I have to connect every month to my dashboard to make sure my account won't be deleted. I think is too often. - I cannot add and delete domains on my own (team is working on it) Otherwise : Team is awesome, responsive and kind Plesk dashboard is easy to use with plenty of functions For a free hosting plan, it is the best service
By Julien
Response from HelioHost· May 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.
The following error often occurs: "502 Bad Gateway nginx"
By customer
Response from HelioHost· May 20, 2026
Thanks for taking the time to leave a review, Lafl. The reason you see a 502 error is because Apache needs to restart. On Tommy and Johnny you can see a 502 error for a bit until the Apache restart finishes. This is because there are so many domains on those plans. We think this is good enough for a free plan, but we understand that some people want better uptime so we released a new server named Morty where you will never see a 502 error. It looks like you donated $9 in 2021, and another $5 in 2025. I can give you a free trial of Morty if you'd like to see what it's like to not have 502 errors. If you'd like to stay on Morty it only costs $1 per month which isn't too bad considering you've been willing to donate to us in the past. Let us know if you're interested. Hopefully after you see how much faster and how much better the uptime is on Morty you'll consider increasing your rating to 5 stars.
I've been using HelioHost for over a decade, and I love it. The forums are very knowledgeable, and I love the variety of technologies available to me.
By Olego
Response from HelioHost· May 19, 2026
Thanks for the 5 star review, Olego. Our forums really are a great public resource for everyone. We've accumulated over 300k posts over the last 21 years covering a vast range of hosting issues and related discussion. Quite a few people find HelioHost just by googling some issue they're having on some other hosting service, and then they find the solution for their issue on our forum. Once they find us they usually sign up for an account too, so it's a great form of free advertising. Let us know if you need help with anything.
Muy buena y segura.
By Jorge L.
Response from HelioHost· May 7, 2026
Thanks for the 5 star review, Jorge! We're glad you think our hosting service is very good and safe. For people who are signing up for free hosting there isn't really anything to lose, so there's not too much to worry about. However for the customers like yourself that are signing up for a paid plan like Morty, it's useful for other potential customers to know that it's safe to pay us for hosting. Let us know if you need help with anything. Translate.google.com: ¡Gracias por tu reseña de 5 estrellas, Jorge! Nos alegra saber que consideras que nuestro servicio de hosting es muy bueno y seguro. Para quienes se registran en el servicio de hosting gratuito, realmente no hay nada que perder, por lo que no hay mucho de qué preocuparse. Sin embargo, para clientes como tú —que contratan un plan de pago, como el plan Morty— resulta muy útil para otros clientes potenciales saber que es seguro pagarnos por el servicio de hosting. Avísanos si necesitas ayuda con algo.
