Deletion Policy

Deletion Policy

This Deletion Policy describes our policies and procedures on the deletion and removal of your information and data when you use our hosting service or contact support.

Community Support

HelioHost is a non-profit run by volunteers who receive no pay for helping you with your hosting issues or maintaining the servers. We volunteer for this organization because we enjoy it, and believe in the mission of providing free hosting to people who can't afford paid hosting. We aren't owned by a for-profit company, we don't have a full time staff of paid employees, and don't have a quota of how many people we need to force to upgrade each month. If we aren't having fun volunteering, or if you are rude to us, we will go do something more enjoyable for us. We aren't required to volunteer a certain number of hours each week, and we may come and go as we please.

In order to reduce the work required by our volunteers, and in order to recruit new volunteers, all of our support is community based and public. This means if someone else has had the same issue as you, we encourage you to search our forum and our wiki to find the solution that worked for other previous users. This also means that regular users can help each other out if they know the answer to someone else's question. All of our volunteers started out as regular users who decided to be helpful and answer other users questions. When we see someone being helpful in the community we sometimes offer them a promotion to give them more tools and more access to be even more helpful.

Privacy Policy

Our Privacy Policy can be read at https://heliohost.org/privacy/ If you have concerns about your privacy, please contact us, and let us know how we can help. We will do everything we can to keep your private data private.

Private Support

We do not currently offer private support, but enough people have expressed interest in private support that we do plan on implementing it in some form in the future. Since private support increases the workload on our volunteers and reduces the helpfulness of our user searchable resources, it will not be free. Therefore, only donors will be allowed to use private support. The exact details of the private support and donation level required to access private support will be announced on our news section when it becomes available. There is currently no ETA on when this will be released.

Support Request Deletion

The whole point of community support is for the support requests to be visible to other users so they can solve their own issues by searching or find solutions to their problems, so deleting support requests is detrimental to that goal. Even if your support request is as simple as "add this domain please" it may be useful for someone who doesn't know how to add domains to their account and finds your post. "Oh, I can just make a post like this to get a new domain added!" Generally requests to delete a whole support request will be denied for this reason. If there is specific information in the support request that you consider private let us know, and those portions can be redacted.

Username Deletion

When you signup for an account with HelioHost it is clearly stated during the signup process not to pick a username that contains anything that you consider private information.

If you need support, you will be asked to provide this username to identify your account where it will be visible to other users, so don't use anything in your username that you consider private information.

Unfortunately, not everyone reads things so occasionally someone makes the mistake of creating a username that contains private information. We can help you fix the issue by following these steps:

1. Make a backup of anything on your account that you don't want to lose and download it to somewhere safe.
2. Request an account reset in order to change your username.
3. During the reset process choose a different username that doesn't contain private information.
4. Restore the backups to your account after the reset.
5. Contact support to request that the previous username that contains private information be changed to the new username that doesn't contain private information.

If you think your username is private information and you want it removed from a support request you must first either:

1. Change your username
2. Delete your account

Requests to remove usernames from support requests who haven't already done of the two options listed above will be denied.

Domain Deletion

We don't consider domain names to be private information. On the contrary, most people pay good money to get their domains listed in as many places on the internet as possible, because the more links to their site exist, the higher their website will rank on search engine results. We provide this optimization service of giving your website a boost in search engine results for free to any of our users who has a website hosted with us and a legitimate support request.

Frequently, people who ask to have their domain removed from their support requests do so because they are under the incorrect assumption that their website will be "more secure" or "impossible to find" if it isn't listed on our forum. Security by obscurity never works. Just for fun we have tried creating domains with 50 randomly selected letters and numbers that we never post anywhere publicly, but it doesn't matter because the bots always eventually find it anyways. Sometimes it takes a few weeks, sometimes it takes a few months, but eventually the 404 errors for wp_login.php start showing up. If you want your website to be secure use actual security measures, such as SSL which we provide for free, or password protection. Hoping no one finds it is like hoping no one finds your front door key under your floor mat. It's laughably bad security.

After acknowledging that it will not improve the security of your website and also acknowledging that you want your search engine optimization to be worse, if you would still like to have your domain name removed from one of your support requests, we will be happy to help. We generally try to reply to all support requests within 24 hours.

Suspended Account Deletion

Depending on why an account was suspended we may not be able to delete it for you right away. For instance, if the contents of the account need to be held as evidence for law enforcement our policy is to hold the data for at least 60 days. This is our policy because we want to do everything within our power to help stop criminals from committing more crimes.

Since HelioHost is based in the United States we have to comply with United States law. A common misunderstanding is people think that since they live in country X they don't have to follow the laws of the United States. If you use a hosting service that is also located in country X that is true, but if you use HelioHost you have to follow the laws of the country HelioHost is located in, which is the United States. We understand that not everyone is familiar with what is and what is not legal in the United States so we encourage you to read our Terms of Service first, and also talk with us prior to uploading your website to make sure it will be ok.